Many larger companies feel an understandable desire to move toward, centralized, enterprise-level software licensing agreements. Such frameworks often have the advantage of allowing licensees to spread their license spends more evenly over the term of the agreement and to focus somewhat less intensely on some software asset management (SAM) obligations. In that vein, Oracle offers…
Many companies would like to know whether and to what extent their existing Oracle software product licenses entitle them to use that software in a third-party cloud-hosting environment – such as Amazon Web Services’ (AWS’s) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment – and, if so, whether that usage would be subject to different license metrics or…
Enterprise-level software solutions often entail complex licensing challenges. Many of the thorniest questions often center on how to license software in virtualized environments, especially if the goal is to use something less than the full processing power of the hosting infrastructure. IBM licensees should be familiar with Big Blue’s requirement (in most cases) to deploy…
It is common practice for software publishers to incorporate by reference various licensing rules and policies to govern the usage of the publishers’ software products. For example, Microsoft’s volume license agreements (such as MPSAs or Enterprise Agreements) incorporate Microsoft’s Product Terms, Online Services Terms and Service Level Agreement for Online Services (among other documents), with…
Many software publishers recognize that perpetual licenses should be, true to their name, perpetual, and that unless you violate the terms of the licenses they should remain in effect forever. As the licensee, you may not want to use that Microsoft Office 97 license you purchased fifteen years ago. However, if it suits your needs…
The software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution-delivery model is becoming more and more widespread. Developers of all kinds of software solutions – products covering everything from office productivity, design, accounting, CRM, business intelligence and more – increasingly are realizing that it is often more feasible and profitable to offer those solutions to customers via the Internet under a…
Oracle’s “Technology” software products (such as its WebLogic and Database programs) are very popular products. Unfortunately, as we have explained numerous times here, Oracle’s license agreements and compliance practices entail numerous pitfalls for unwary users of those products. Being caught in one of those pitfalls can result in substantial, unforeseen expenses following an audit by…
In order to effectively manage their software usage and to mitigate software license-compliance exposure, companies need to know how to gather information regarding their product usage. While some software products may have unique data-collection requirements that ordinarily would not be applicable for other products, usage levels for many products can be measured using a common…
Oracle maintains what I consider to be the most aggressive audit program of any major software publisher. Its licensing rules can be extremely difficult to understand, and they frequently are not clearly stated in the applicable license agreements. Moreover, Oracle’s License Management Services (LMS) team typically is unforgiving when it comes time to apply those…
On July 28, Oracle announced that it had entered into an agreement to acquire NetSuite for approximately $9.3 billion. NetSuite was founded in 1998 and is one of the very first, enterprise-level, cloud-services providers, delivering various, hosted enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), e-commerce and professional services automation (PSA) solutions to its customers….
