How do you chose an Oracle Licensing Consultant?

I often hear customers talk about "The Dark Art of Licensing" when it comes to Oracle. This conjures up an image of Oracle licensing being some mysterious unquantifiable entity. In some respects, this is true. With rules that are educational, case by case judgements, licensing that is crafted by agreement and contract value.

We see customers with “No-Audit” Clauses, End User Specific license populations, and customers who have all kinds of wonderful exceptions to their licensing agreements, in fact from what I have seen in the last 20 years is that most customers have some unique license metric, either by definition, modification or negotiation.

When we work with customer and they share a folder called “Oracle Licensing” and it’s full of great contract data, it’s smiles all round. When the customer tells us that the team or person managing Oracle licensing, (Procurement, IT, Legal) have all left since and no-one can find anything apart from a purchase order dated 2016, it’s time to roll the sleeves up and get stuck in.

So, what has this got to do with how do you choose an Oracle Licensing Consultant?

Sure, anyone with some experience of Oracle can probably explain the “Core Conversion Factor” or how to license on VMware or Cloud. There are some who may remember how to License Concurrent Device, and there will be others who may wince at UPU’s.

The point here is that this skill is pretty unique, and that you need some-one with exposure to a wide variety of Oracle Licensing “rules” in the real world.

For me the top “skills” an Oracle License Consultant needs are: ( in no particular order as they are all important)

·????????Understanding how a customer’s environment (Architecture) impacts their licensing.

·????????Can read a contract, and understand the minutia that really matter.

·????????Have the perseverance to go through order form by order form and track every metric

·????????Be able to draw on the experience of peers.

·????????Have a catalogue of Licensing information going back to the 1990’s

·????????Understand why the rules exist in the first place

·????????Experience

·????????Formulate a plan to ensure that the customers future requirements are satisfied.

·????????Be able to articulate to management what the risks are and why.

·????????Give great practical advice.

You may have noticed something, I’ve not included anything about the data analysis of Oracle Scripts, or Oracle Usage Inventory. For me, it’s a completely different job specification. This is where Oracle is very different from other software Vendors, finding what needs licensing is a whole different ball park, it’s actually a cricket pitch.

For most software titles you are looking at deployment, for Oracle you are looking for usages of a particular option from data that has been extracted from a database. Not an executable in sight.

This Job Title/Specification doesn’t seem to exist. At a high level some may call the role a “SAM Consultant”. But I want to call them something specific: ?I’m going to call them the “Oracle Deployment Inventory Analyst”.

?The High-lights of this job are, again in no particular order:

?·????????Detailed knowledge of Oracle Scripts/ Tool outputs

·????????Understanding why the scripts are collecting the data

·????????Understanding of SQL queries

·????????Knowledge of all Oracle licensing rules

·????????Knowledge of a varied range of Hardware

·????????Experience

·????????Understanding of Virtualization technologies

·????????Clear view of Cloud Infrastructure

·????????Root cause analysis

Manual processing of Oracle Usage Inventory, scripts or tool outputs is in a class of its own when it comes to interpretational analysis. For those who don’t know, Oracle itself has teams globally dedicated to this task, assisted with automatic processing of usage data, covering Database, Middleware and Applications.

Many Oracle Licensing Consultancies use third-parties to do the back-end Oracle data processing or Script analysis services to do just that. In fact, we have provided services to quite a few of them.

For me it’s interesting how everyone thinks an Oracle Licensing Consultant will have all the above skills, in my experience there’s not many that do.

So, when your next Oracle Purchase, Support Renewal, Datacentre Consolidation, M&A or Cloud Migration comes along, sit down with your key stakeholders and find out what is really missing from your approach by asking the right questions. What is the skill set we need to get the best possible result.

From the Cloud Migration project who did not have visibility of where Oracle was installed, to the new Oracle project that thinks a Processor License is needed when a half price NUP is possible, to the support renewal team who needs to know the rules about cancelling support and to the M&A team who need to know what risks they’re buying into, get the best tools, people and processes for the job. And don't forget you'll need a great Project Manager, as us Oracle Licensing Consultants and Oracle Deployment Inventory Analysts get really busy, especially from January onwards!

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