Over the past few months, I've 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 they can easily understand and then use
to communicate and negotiate their software license agreement with
Oracle. They've explained that they're frequently given information
about their IT Departments' use of Oracle that is not easily translated
into Oracle licensing metrics.
Raw Data or Wrong Data?
These professionals 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 uneasiness
about the accuracy of the information they were getting - from CPU
counts to database option usage).
Competing Counts
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.
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Re: Centralizing Software Usage and Software License Management
