As if the licensing agreements of the likes of Oracle, SAP and Microsoft were not complicated enough already, many user organizations fall foul of something called indirect usage and end up owing significant amounts as a result of licensing non-compliance.

Indirect usage, or indirect access, or sometimes called multiplexing, is where your software (be it Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, or whatever) is accessed indirectly by a non-named third party, which can either be a person or machine. For example, an organisation has created a system that allows all their employees to enter their expenses. That system then sends all that employee expense information to a second system using a single named user account.

All users of the expense system are indirect users of the second system and should be considered when licensing the second system by a user based metric. As SAP and Oracle utilize ‘Named User’ type licenses, you will be non-compliant if each and every one of these users is not fully licensed.

SOURCE: certero.com