Is Your Oracle Software Delivering Value to Your Business?

Oracle can often be the greatest line item in an organisation’s IT budget, this is because of the years it has delivered very high end, high value solutions to the enterprise space.  Numerous critical business systems that are at the heart of the engine of the organisation often are run on Oracle.

As with most vendors, they want to ensure they are rewarded for the value that this delivers to your business and it is thought that this is why licensing models, metrics, terms and conditions are subject to change.  And to a degree, from a business and IP protection perspective this is a logical approach.

What most organisations struggle with is how to apply these changes to their estate and also how to ensure strict policy and processes are being adhered to.

Software Partitioning / The VMware Issue

It is fair to say that VMware is a prominent player in the virtualisation and hypervisor market and this technology is a mature offering that most customers utilise.  The ongoing issue with Oracle in this space is firstly the licensing impacts to running Oracle on VMware (or any software partitioning software such as Hyper-V) can be severe and secondly the support / certification issue.

The bad news is Oracle have not certified the VMware platform to run Oracle software on and this is mainly down to the code sharing between the two organisations on how the structure of the architecture works.  This is unlikely to be resolved with these two heavyweight technology solutions providers where there is some overlap of functionality.  This issue also affects the licensing elements as well where all physical hosts need to be licensed for Oracle software where the measurement is Processor (predominantly the Database stack).

The good news is between Oracle and VMware the solution is fully supported albeit with certain terms and conditions.  Oracle will support the solution if the issue is either a known bug or if the issue can be replicated on a native OS.  The other good news is that there are significant optimisation avenues you can visit from hardware optimisation to architectural reengineering to licence optimisation opportunities that could save significant audit penalties and optimise and drive better value from your Oracle investments.

Contact SCC to help you optimise your Oracle usage and increase your efficient processes around Adobe software procurement strategy through our SCC SMART-BUY service.

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