Oracle Open World 2019 took place last week and we want to comment on the news coming out from SF. We took the liberty to go live on YouTube to talk about what is happening and what was NOT being talked about, here is a link to the 45min questions and answers.

The biggest news coming out of Oracle OpenWorld for us was the partnership with VMWare. But is it really news? We hosted a online training class and almost half of the participants thought that Oracle had now changed its licensing policy. Which they have NOT done. Its still the biggest licensing trap when it comes to Oracle licensing. Oracle have for years been feasting on companies who did not understanding Oracle’s “licensing policies”.

For the past year they have renamed their LMS organization and are approaching the same companies they audited for millions in the years past.
“we are now good guys, please pay us some more money for contractual language to allow for limited usage in VMWare”.

But that contractual language is not adding value to your business. By paying more money to Oracle, they are not helping your company build more cars, build more restaurants, get more customers. It is just another way for the Oracle to milk more money from you without selling you anything new.

Our comment & views on it in this article “Oracle VMware Con”   

Oracle Licensing News

#1  Multi Tenant – Licensing
Oracle announced in 19c you can use multi tenant without an additional license. This “Oracle Multitenant – Licensing update” is worth reading.

#2  Standard Edition 2 and Real Application Clusters – Licensing
While not announced during OOW19, beginning from 19c you cannot use RAC for Standard Edition Database.

#3  Oracle changing its audit clause.
If you missed it, a few months ago Oracle changed its audit clause. The audit exists in your Oracle Master Agreement. (OMA)
It will ONLY change if you sign a new OMA. So as long as you have your old OMA – no change/impact for you.

But when it expires you should have a strategy for negotiating this clause. We have read some SAM articles saying “Now customers have no choice, you MUST
run Oracle Data measurement tools” – We don’t agree with that at all. There is still plenty of room for negotiation on if you want to run Oracle scripts or not.

We notice that some SAM consultancies have now written publicly “with the new audit clause, you have no choice but to run Oracle scripts”

We notice that the SAM consultancy main business is providing script analysis, so maybe their advise is not completely neutral. Our advise is that make up your own mind how much you want to co-operate with Oracle and then make a decision if you want to run their scripts.

Summary

– No change for your company until your company needs to sign a new OMA.
– If you need to sign a OMA, try to negotiate the audit clause, removing language about running their data measurement tools.
– What we can agree on is that the contract language has been changed in Oracles favour, to gain more leverage in audit negotiations.