Today, mergers and acquisitions are as common as marriages or people setting up households together, and may present unfounded opportunities for lowering your Oracle support stream and uncovering more favorable terms and conditions.
Reinstating terminated support. When a company takes on an acquisition or makes a divestiture, the hard assets – furniture, equipment, electronics, etc. – are easily categorized or sold off, but it’s easy to overlook “soft” assets such as software, licensing and support. In both scenarios (M&A or divestiture), you likely have access and/or rights to reinstate a more favorable prior support stream, creating a more advantageous environment including pricing. Please note: Terminated licenses cannot be reinstated as we accidentally and incorrectly mentioned in this morning’s newsletter.
Don’t forget about support renewals. Many of your older software vendor contracts probably have some sweet Terms & Conditions that you don’t want to lose. Remember that you are responsible for the annual support renewals (and not your Oracle rep). Every time you allow a renewal to lapse, you lose those advantageous T&Cs and licensing goes up between 15 to 25%.
The initial questions to ask yourself are: