How Oracle Licensing Is Affected By Current Business / Industry / Technology Changes

Now more than ever decision makers are faced with difficult choices. A number of factors may be affecting your business, including loss of revenue due to pandemic, shift to remote collaboration, pressure to move to the Cloud, and striving to stay on top of industry and technology changes. Most of these decisions would likely have software licensing implications. Here are a few examples: Move to the Cloud: When choosing between on-premise, hardware hosting provider or Cloud platform, a proper comparison […]

Microsoft Announces New Restrictions on Licensing in the Cloud

Microsoft Cloud Service Provider Policy Change Microsoft has announced the availability of Dedicated Hosts. In conjunction with this announcement, Microsoft will implement new rules effective October 1, 2019 surrounding the use of traditional on-premise licenses with cloud-based dedicated hosts. Aimed at services which provide for single-tenant hosts, the move by Microsoft follows Oracle’s treatment of deployments at service providers and might be viewed as a revenue generating tactic. Policy Change Overview New or upgraded licenses purchased after October 1, 2019 […]

Oracle Virtualization Compliance

Any mention of virtualization causes many people to immediately think of VMware, as they remain to be a main player among virtualization technologies. The challenge of keeping up with Oracle’s evolving licensing requirements of virtualization platforms can be a daunting endeavor for many IT departments and Oracle database administrators. Any technological advancement made by VMware, specifically relating to any abilities to easily move server sessions around the virtualized environment, prompts a new possible interpretation of licensing requirements by Oracle on […]

5 Things Oracle No Longer Offers in 2017

If your renewal is coming up soon and you were planning on using one of these, you may need to change your plans.  Here are 5 things that Oracle no longer offers in 2017: 1. Priceholds: Priceholds used to be the “bread and butter” of Oracle offerings, but are now quite uncommon. Besides being rare, their benefits are constricted, having a limited scope (in terms of applicable products) and limited discounts on subsequent procurements. 2. Limited Use: Many Oracle products […]

Saving on PVU-based IBM software

IBM accepts a wide variety of virtualization technologies including VMware. With IBM allowing subcapacity licensing, there is a misconception that this method of counting licensing is automatic. Please refer to IBM’s licensing rules. Currently the Passport Advantage agreement is in effect and it is only 9 pages long – http://public.dhe.ibm.com/software/passportadvantage/PA_Agreements/PA_Agreement_International_English.pdf With subcapacity licensing, you have reporting responsibilities. Either use IBM License Metric Tool (ILMT), or if exempt follow the alternate reporting method described by IBM. Once you’ve passed this hurdle, […]

Enterprise IT is from Venus; software vendors are from Mars

To quote Jonathan Feldman of InformationWeek: “Enterprise IT is from Venus; software vendors are from Mars.” This statement should be funny, but unfortunately it’s all to true to be laughable. Jonathan recently wrote a great piece about how licensing changes happen without notice and often without making much sense. Microsoft and VMWare are the vendors in particular called out in this instance, both with bad track records for making confusing and frequent changes to their licensing. He makes some interesting […]