A Second Opinion Saves Software Company from $8M ULA Mistake

A global leader in cloud-based administration software, with over 1,000 employees, was under audit by Oracle and turned to a third-party SAM provider for support, hoping to gain an advantage. Instead, they were hit with a staggering $57 million compliance gap after the provider applied Oracle's Partitioning Policy, recommending an $8 million ULA to resolve the issue. Unwilling to accept this daunting outcome, the Senior Vice President of IT sought a second opinion from LicenseFortress. Through expert analysis, LicenseFortress uncovered only $200,000 in actual compliance gaps, helping the company avoid the $8 million ULA mistake and secure a much better outcome.

The software company had six VMware clusters. One cluster to support middleware, another to support the Oracle database, and a third cluster for all non-Oracle software. It also had the same cluster configuration to support Disaster Recovery (DR). They kept their Oracle workloads restricted to those six environments in both the production and DR environments.

Naturally, the terms of the Partitioning Policy are overwhelmingly lucrative for Oracle. Following Oracle's virtualizing licensing policy: They would need to count all the physical ESXi hosts' physical cores in all the vCenter Server Instances, even if your organization is not running Oracle across the entire VMware environment. Based on this position, the software company's total core count was 306.

The third-party firm concluded that the software company was out of compliance and owed $57 million in back licenses and fines. It recommended they settle with Oracle by purchasing an Unlimited License Agreement (ULA) for $8 million.

Before making any payments, the software company's board directed its executives to engage another consulting firm and contacted LicenseFortress for a second opinion. LicenseFortress analyzed the same scripts that the previous consulting firm had analyzed. And on the contrary, no issue was found with the VMware configuration that the software company had set up.

Lastly, LicenseFortress found two minor compliance gaps totaling $200k:

• Unlicensed usage of the Tuning Pack
• DR environment was not licensed for WebLogic

$8M ULA Mistake Avoided—Settled for $200K Instead

Ultimately, the software company decided to bring in an outside consultant and not rely on an Oracle audit. Unfortunately, the company learned that "all consulting firms are not equal."

However, they settled their compliance issue for $200,000, avoiding an $8 million ULA mistake and its 22% annual support costs.