Oracle: Five guaranteed cost-saving initiatives

Monica State, senior licensing specialist, ITAMS says: "Acquiring a licence from Oracle goes hand in hand with purchasing support. Most customers do not pay careful attention to this, but they should because, cost-wise, this is where Oracle gets most of its revenue."

According to State one area to pay special attention to when looking at support costs is purchasing support for a licence within a licence set. Oracle licensing specifies the following: "I you decide to purchase technical support for any licence within a licence set, you are required to purchase technical support at the same level for all licences within that licence set."

But what is a licence set? According to Oracle, it consists of: all licences of a program, including any options or self-service module; all licences of a program that share the same source code; for Crystal Ball programs, the same licences of a program contained on a single order; and, for Oracle Java Embedded Binary programs, all of the distributed units of each unique Java application product licensed pursuant to the Java BLRA agreement between you and Oracle.

So, says  State: "As you can see, it’s very difficult to know if you’ve bought licences in a set or not, and is therefore difficult to know what your support costs might be."

The ITAM Review is running an Oracle licensing seminar on Friday 21 November - http://www.itassetmanagement.net/2014/09/22/oracle-seminar/