Introduction
How big can a small Oracle investment cost you in an audit?
Founded in the mid-1800’s, this small manufacturing company is a recognized industry leader that has consistently outpaced its competition. They continuously develop innovative and pioneering indusrty products. While strong on the manufacturing side, this organization had little in-house IT expertise. Therefore, they engaged a third-party IT service to support their systems. Unfortunately, a miscommunication between the manufacturer and third-party IT service left an operational gap: no one was watching how the Oracle® database licenses were being deployed. This problem came home to roost when the manufacturer received a Oracle audit.
From the start, the manufacturer realized it could not manage an Oracle audit without the right expertise and engaged LicenseFortress for assistance. At the time of the audit, the manufacturer was running their databases in a VMware® environment and spending under $15,000 a year in Oracle licenses.
Challenges
Big compliance issues from hardware upgrade
The LicenseFortress team initially performed a Compliance & Optimization Review to measure the organization’s risk.
For this engagement, LicenseFortress reviewed the company’s Oracle license contract and inventoried the VMware environment to validate its use of Oracle licenses. There was good news and bad news:
Good News: The customer was in the middle of a hardware upgrade. Unbeknownst to them, this would have invalidated their Standard Edition licensing. Resulting in the need to buy new Enterprise Edition licenses at a cost of over $1 million. LicenseFortress recognized this issue and provided alternative hardware options to avoid the compliance issue.
Bad News: The manufacturer did not realize that their development and test environments counted for licensing purposes. Thus was not properly controlling them. Conservatively, this would have cost them $70,000 in new Oracle licenses.
But with LicenseFortress, even the bad news turned into good news. Once the assessment was completed, LicenseFortress formulated a remediation plan, which included re-architecting the VMware environment and reconfiguring how the testing and development environments were handled. The LicenseFortress team stepped in to handle the Oracle audit, allowing the in-house team to stay focused on their day-to-day jobs. They provided evidence of compliance negotiated directly with Oracle License Management Services (LMS) on the customer’s behalf.
Solution
LicenseFortress technical expertise allowed for rearchtecture and greater savings
In the end, the LicenseFortress team was able to complete the audit with no adverse findings and no additional payments required. LicenseFortress also identified support costs that the manufacturer no longer needed to pay Oracle. This amounted to a 25 percent savings.
The bottom line: The manufacturer paid $8,000 for the Compliance & Optimization Review (COR). It took two weeks to complete, saved the company $3,500 annually. Additionally, it avoided compliance issues that could have cost the company millions.
As part of the engagement, LicenseFortress spent considerable time educating the organization on Oracle licensing issues. Today, the manufacturer continues to use the ArxPlatform to manage their Oracle license compliance.
Cost Savings
Saved over $1 million in audit fees and $3.5K in annual support costs
