Overspend, over licensing, and needless ongoing maintenance costs that cause expenditures for Oracle software are rampant. Organizations that try to get a handle on the ever-escalating financial impacts on their own, find it near impossible and their requests to Oracle for financial relief nearly always fall on deaf ears. The deliberate complexity of deploying Oracle software and the rights that organizations have for the use of the software (not to mention the countless extensions) make staying compliant and controlling costs seem impossible. However, not only is this control within your grasp but MetrixData 360 is here to help. At MetrixData 360, we routinely identify and help you to reclaim savings of 20-30% on your Oracle spend.
MetrixData 360’s Self-Assessment ‘Oracle license audit’ will simulate an actual audit and will give you the visibility that you need to finally take control of both compliance and managing costs related to Oracle software. This will give you confidence and assurance in your license position, should Oracle auditors come knocking. Since we are completely independent from Oracle, you can be certain that no information will be shared with Oracle during this engagement, a self-assessment is meant to only work towards your goals.
Our Oracle internal license audit precisely simulates an actual license audit that would be conducted by Oracle’s License Management Services division (LMS). MetrixData 360 resources, who oversee these engagements, are themselves ex-auditors who have conducted hundreds of audits. They understand not only the process but also the levers and internal metrics that LMS uses to pull large settlements from their customers. In addition to understanding what your organization has deployed against what you have the rights to use, our team will make Oracle license strategy recommendations for optimization, weed out what’s not being used from past purchases, help correctly size your environment, and make sure you are only paying what you need to.
Below are the steps of this service. Each step is divided into Inputs, Activities, and Outputs: Details are specified in the full Service Description (request below).
Gaining an understanding of your Oracle agreements, license definitions, and custom contract wordings that are the foundation of the internal audit.
Knowing your contractual definitions, we now work with your teams to determine the deployment in the most effective way possible. Our audit scripting capabilities will benefit the timelines while minimizing the time from our client’s IT teams.
The Effective License Position (ELP) compares your license grant with the actual deployment. It is quantified in the number of licenses as well as the financial exposure (Oracle license and support fees).
Compliance gaps can often be significantly reduced. This stage ensures that work with the highest impact is prioritized. In addition, we ensure that no new risks are introduced during the remediation activities.
What follows is a list of core features that make up the MetrixData 360 Oracle Internal License Audit Service.
Detailed instructions on how to pull deployment data from your environment. Our goal is to minimize the time and impact data collection has on your internal resources. We can use data that is already available from any of the Software Asset Management tools on the market or, we will provide scripts that will pull the data that we need. The MetrixData 360 Team doesn’t require any access to your internal systems. You simply provide us with the data that we will work with. We maintain a strict level of confidentiality with all of our clients when we enter into an engagement.
This first pass will show you what you would receive from LMS in an actual audit conducted by Oracle. It may feel nerve-wracking but, rest assured, the preliminary position is simply meant to help you understand common areas that Oracle will overstate compliance gaps and make incorrect assumptions that could have major financial impact. This estimate may easily be far higher than what you really owe or need, numbers that MetrixData 360 will help you to discover.
Using the Estimated License Position, the MetrixData 360 team will compile a detailed list of the potential costs that could be incurred due to the areas of risk identified in the ELP.
Our team of licensing experts will perform an exhaustive analysis of how each title is deployed and put it up against your rights outlined in your contracts with Oracle. We will also look at historical use rights from past contracts and any amendments your organization may have negotiated that are specific to your company regarding the way the software is being utilized. We will also identify unused software that you are paying yearly maintenance fees on. It is not uncommon to find between 20 and 30% of the maintenance costs you are paying every year are for software not even being used that was purchased as part of bundled offerings.
We recently had a mid-tier American Insurance company of roughly 2,000 employees come to us, much to the disgruntlement of their IT department. Their Software Asset Management team was worried that their software environment was becoming too disorganized, but the IT department was confident they had everything under control. After conducting a review of 20 vendors, we gave our client our findings.
Oracle held the largest compliance issue, being known as a company that is easy to fall out of compliance with.
The review of the Oracle software produced a compliance gap of $1.5 million USD.
The reasons for this were issues surrounding the virtualization of Oracle software. Essentially, when putting multiple Oracle products on a single server (in this case it was an IBM server), you must be able to prove to Oracle that any given Oracle product is only using a small portion of the server or else the whole server must be licensed for that product (which is far more expensive).
Being unable to prove that their Oracle products were only using a small portion of the server, they were forced to license the whole server for every Oracle product, which was more than doubled the licenses that they required (and was also double the licenses that they actually had).
In addition to this main issue, we also discovered that the client had deployed optional Oracle products that the client had assumed were a free addition but, they needed a license for it.
Working with a shocked IT department, we showed them how to reconfigure their Oracle products so that they could eliminate that 1.5 million USD compliance gap.
Should an Oracle audit ever occur for our client, Oracle will find a polished and completely compliance gap-free software environment regarding Oracle products.
In regard to the optional products that they needed a license for, we informed them of which licenses they required, and they are currently in the midst of either uninstalling or purchasing licenses for these products.