Retailers are a unique breed when it comes to licensing. We recently worked with a number of retailers seeking to understand their Oracle licensing and they all had a mix of Named User Plus licensing and CPU licensing. With Oracle or any enterprise software for that matter, licensing is about access and authority, but not necessarily limited to people. The latter being an extremely important point to software licensing, usage and retailers.
One of the major differences in the retail industry is the equipment that houses the software application – from point of sales equipment such as registers and scanners to backroom inventory systems. These systems need to be considered as part of the licensing mix and, more often than not (in our experience), the IT executives at retailers overlook them.
So, if you’re a retailer, you may want to take another look at your Oracle licensing inventory.