202003.06
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Unlimited License Agreements for Oracle Products

Technology departments are continuously looking for ways to reduce costs related to software. Many larger enterprises are considering licensing software products on an enterprise-wide basis. For Oracle products, an unlimited license agreement (“ULA”) approach can be beneficial in terms of license management, but the transition from a ULA back to limited licenses can present problems…

201908.26
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Avoid Oracle ULA Termination Risks

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…

201908.20
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Hosting Oracle Software Carries Risks

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…

201812.06
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Licensing Oracle in the Cloud (Microsoft, Amazon or Oracle)

Julie Machal-Fulks, The ITAM Review, 12/06/2017 Increasingly, companies are considering outsourcing datacenter workloads to third-party hosted or cloud environments. Software publishers like Oracle are not only publishing guidance on how to count licenses that are installed in a third-party cloud environment, Oracle is also offering its own cloud solutions to customers. Although moving the Oracle…

201809.13
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How to Understand Oracle’s Use of its Partitioning Policy for Virtualization

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…

201803.15
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Oracle Licensing: Hard Partitioning and Disaster Recovery

When licensing Oracle products, many businesses fail to understand the licensing requirements for virtual technologies and disaster recovery.  These licensing mistakes can result in significant unbudgeted expenses related to Oracle software licensing. (1) Virtualization Virtualized hardware is now fairly pervasive in the IT world. But, incorrectly virtualizing an environment can have catastrophic effects to a…

201802.14
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Oracle Audit Risks

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…

201801.09
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Licensing Implications of Oracle’s NetSuite Acquisition

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….

201711.27
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Oracle’s Aggressive Audit Tactics Draw Increasing Media Attention

“In hindsight, I should have involved our legal team immediately, since they were requesting information that had nothing to do with Oracle.” Wise words. A recent article published by Business Insider (here) is the latest in a run of recent media attention (more here) that Oracle has received regarding the software audit practices of its…