Oracle Licensing – Why accuracy matters
By Andy Ellwood: iQuate
iQuate has discovered discrepancies between accepted and actual Oracle deployment and usage information in every customer we have worked with, and our customers have used this accurate data to achieve greater levels of control in several key areas.
For example, a high profile UK government agency delivering public facing services outsourced its IT operations to a large Systems Integrator. In order to ensure they were compliant, the SI employed a team of Oracle experts to perform a manual Oracle inventory count.
iQuate were engaged to verify the result of this audit using iQSonar. The tool was initially deployed in a test environment to satisfy the client that running the tool would have no detrimental impact on the performance or availability of key business critical applications.
Once deployed across the entire network, iQSonar discovered that the manual audit was incorrect. This discrepancy was caused by the SI having prepared a list of Options installed, rather than Options in use. Had this been reported to Oracle, the licence position would have been overstated to a list price value of £1.1m
In a separate example iQuate was engaged with a major international insurance services organisation. During the scanning process our team was told Oracle would not be discovered on Windows-based or Virtual servers because installation of Oracle on Windows or Virtual environments were against company policy and the customer had strict processes and procedures in place that governed the installation of software.
Within the first day, iQSonar had discovered Oracle on Windows server and Virtualized Windows and Linux servers, despite management being assured only days previously that this was not the case.
iQSonar uncovered seven digit licence savings for the customer, and also prompted a review of operational procedures that led to improved operational management and control.
iQSonar is the only third party tool verified by Oracle as providing accurate and definitive Oracle deployment and usage data.
