by: Jeff Jones
Over the past few months, I have had many professionals in the supply chain and procurement space say they would be interested in finding a process that provides a way to depict their Oracle database deployments in a manner which they can easily understand and then use to communicate and negotiate their software license agreement with Oracle. They have explained that they are frequently given information about their IT Departments’ use of Oracle that is not easily translated into Oracle licensing metrics. They also complained that they frequently get this information in a variety of different formats from different divisions or groups within their own company, and some of the IT personnel put their own interpretation on what should be licensed, or how it should be licensed, before delivering the raw data to them. (And after talking a little more, almost all individuals expressed a general un-easiness about the accuracy of the information they were getting… from CPU counts to database option usage).
In a recent example, a procurement officer told me that he had two different divisions of his company delivering named user count minimums using a different interpretation of the Oracle licensing rules: one enforcing named user minimums at the server level, the other providing a summarized count of named user minimums. This results in inconsistent data and the inability of having a true understanding of what is actually being used, by whom, and how often.
…Another example of inconsistencies in data would be IT personnel not delivering the CPU count information in the same manner, and not completely understanding how Oracle calculates a “CPU” for license purposes (which is obviously different than just physically counting CPU’s). In almost all cases, procurement and supply chain officials said they would like to see a solution that could deliver accurate and consistent information about Oracle software usage in an easy-to-use format.
To resolve these problems, IT and procurement need to identify a way that gives better insight into the true picture of what is actually deployed and used to better negotiate their software license agreements.
