Licence Management Today

Today we have an interview with our guest John Lunt, Managing Director of Certero.

This is the second in a series of interviews with prominent experts in the Software Asset management software tools arena.

The interview is carried out by our very own Jane McCulloch and hosted by Kay Williams.

It was a pleasure to talk to John and learn about the new version of Asset Studio.

To contact John please visit Certero.com

See the full transcript at http://madora.co.uk/oracle-software-asset-management-interview-with-john-lunt-of-certero/

Today we have our first ‘Featured’ interview with our guest Maxime Pawlak, Managing Director of Easytrust.

We have lined up a number of very interesting people over the coming months to share their expertise and knowledge in the areas of Software Asset Management, Oracle Licensing and influential IT trends in general.

Maxime will also feature in our next podcast ‘Licence Management Today – Episode 05′.

The full transcript of the interview between Kay and Maxime is on our blog. It was a pleasure to talk to Maxime, who is extremely knowledgeable about the Oracle Compliance marketplace and provides a lot of experiences and know how.

Some Highlights below:

Maxime:

We’re part of the software asset management market, we are specific on that market because we only address Oracle. Usually people, they separate the software management market in the inventory tools and the software management tools and some tools which can do both of them. We can do both of them, we do inventory and we do software asset management but we just do it for Oracle and we can do it right. We can bring up value audits around Oracle licenses problems and solutions. In terms of industry customers we address, we address every single industry who are Oracle customers so it concerns every industry.

Kay: Okay, as a non-technical person could you explain to me what the differences between the inventory tools and the software asset management?

Maxime: Of course, yes. The inventory tools, it’s all about discovering which are the software installed on the laptops or the servers of customers. It’s about with agents or agent-less technologies connecting to that servers or to that laptops and grab some information about the presence of the software installed or not. This is the inventory part of the market and there are some tools in the market which just do inventory. They are especially focused on that feature.

The software asset management part of the market is more about consolidating data which can be provided by inventory tools but it also can be provided by CMDBs or different tools which are already installed in the companies. They provide different features like the ability to put into the tool all the contracts, what other licensing that I have bought. It also provide the ability to get the data from the inventory tools and work on that data in order to reconsolidate this data with the contract information. Most of them, they have catalog with SKUs, which is the unique identifier of the software, and they are the SKU catalog and they can match this SKU of the software which has been bought with the software which has been discovered. Providing that, they can provide some compliance position by comparing what you have bought and what you have deployed. They also provide some capabilities about optimization, the software and the licenses. Sometimes they provide some process and processing of your software asset management policies in terms of workflows or integrations with third party tools. It’s a little bit different on the market.

Kay: It sounds like an inventory tool like yours should be part of any SAM programme, would that be correct?

Maxime: Yes, the software asset management programme could be run without any tools, but as you know you need to have correct data in order to be able to do software asset management so you will definitely have a question of “should I buy an inventory tool” or “do I already have some tools in my company that I can use or extend in order to grab this information I already have somewhere, but I don’t use?”

Maxime: Well, yes, what’s important to understand about the Easytrust tool is that it has been verified by Oracle, so we’re part of support vendor verification program.

Kay: What does that mean as opposed to a tool that’s not verified by Oracle?

Maxime: It means for database because this programme is only for database option and management packs, the tool can be used as a source of data in case of audits. You just have to push one button and you export the equivalent of the Oracle’s scripts results. It means the process is much more easy to run this audit and you are much more secure about the usage of that tool compared to another tool which is not verified.

Kay: Oracle will take the data from your tool and rely on that data?

Maxime: Yes, exactly. I just want to clarify a confusion which is usually made. Data which is taken by Oracle in the verification process, it’s a kind of raw data, it’s not calculated computer data. So one verified tool is not equivalent to another verified tool because what interests customers is not the raw data, it’s the computer data, the calculated data. There are many, many huge differences in the markets between different inventory tools. Some are generalists, we do on the Oracle and we claim to be able to do it very accurately. We’ve seen that on several customers on which we work. We’ve seen different tools, there is all the provide, it’s a generalist approach.

The very specific Oracle rules on every kind of server, on every kind of operating system, every version of it, it’s very hard to implement a tool which to complete and accurate compute of that data. I have to say that, we don’t provide the records during the audit, we don’t provide the calculated data, we provide the raw data. It means that there could be a difference between the results of what Oracle tells at the end of the audit and what the tool says. It’s all about it, the quality of the tool, even if it has been verified by Oracle, it’s a good point, it’s a good start because the verification process tells you at least what are all the data you need to grab and to control from the inventory part in order to propose a proper inventory. It’s not enough, then you have to implement the compute that data to provide how many licenses do I need. For now, even Oracle LMS is doing that kind of job manually using the results of the scripts or using the exports of the verified tools.

Kay: Great. What about the cloud? Are you seeing take-up with this and does this present new challenges?

Maxime:

[The Cloud…] this is changing many things in terms of licensing for Oracle. They are specific rules for Amazon and Azure, also for Oracle public cloud and for private clouds as it goes with virtualization, this has also a huge impact on the licenses and it brings new challenges, but it also brings great opportunities.

We now put the cloud insights in every review we do. We start to propose to our customers to migrate part of their infrastructure to the public cloud. It could be development and tests, for example, environment, it could be the Amazon or the Oracle cloud and we also propose them to change their infrastructure and to create while they change, a private cloud because it’s how people do it now, it’s all about automation. We don’t want DBAs to do the same tasks a hundred times a day, we just want to automate everything and it’s a big change in the Oracle future.

You can learn more about Easytrust and the ‘Easytrust License Management for Oracle ‘ solution at Easytrust.com.

If you would like to get in touch with Maxime simply leave a message on the contact form. You can also follow them on all the social media platforms including Twitter @Easyblogs

Thank you for downloading.

Please find us online at Madora.co.uk.

Would love to hear from you. Drop me a line via email [email protected]

Is Oracle starting to wake up to the demand of its users for more cloud capabilities and flexible licence models?

With recent announcements in Oracle OpenWorld 2014, is Oracle starting to wake up to the demand of its users for more cloud capabilities and flexible licence models?

Oracle’s core business has, like many of the larger enterprise software companies been focused on selling software designed to run on premise and charging a flat fee for the licenses and typically an annual support and maintenance fee. Over the last fifteen years we have seen a number of application providers providing access to their application via subscription models that do not require the purchase of any infrastructure – database, application servers, operating systems, networking or and hardware servers. Although Larry Ellison has in the past been quick to poo poo cloud computing he has clearly woken up to the industry shift.

“We have a new, much-upgraded cloud platform,” Ellison said to his key note speech on the 28th September. “We are just getting started. We launched our real platform this month.”

Previously the only options for customers to run Oracle in the cloud on a true subscription basis was via Amazon or Azure.

Oracle will “have the same pricing as Amazon or any other infrastructure provider,” Chairman Larry Ellison said at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

Oracle has seemed to be behind in many ways with regards to providing utility or SaaS type pricing. Sure Oracle would argue that Fusion Apps have been available for a while and the cloud application portfolio is increasing all the time. However most customers still run ‘on the premise applications’ which are fundamentally different than the Fusion Apps which were written from scratch for the cloud.

It is these traditional ERP/CRM/SCM legacy applications that present a number of problems for customers:

Licensing metrics are often not clear.

It does not allow for the growth or decline of the business.

It does not allow for spikes or seasonal peaks.

It does not lend itself for innovation, testing of new concepts.

It does not allow a trial to review business benefits or ROI.

So what about customers that have written their own apps running on Oracle or use vendor apps based on Oracle? Many want to pay for Oracle technology licences as a subscriptions whether on premise on their own kit or on the cloud.Clearly Oracle is moving this way with enhancements to its PaaS services. See https://cloud.oracle.com/database

The fully ‘Oracle managed’ Oracle database is yet to make an appearance but pricing is available for a number of options. For example the client managed option for High Performance Enterprise Edition is $4,000 / Month per OCPU. This sounds high but it does include a large number of management, testing and security database options. The pricing is also available by the hour so it is absolutely possible to use this for testing, development or backup. It’s per OCPU – not sure what that really means. When I get a better idea I will let you know. Where I see the real opportunity is for the duel running of new systems.

Previously the only real option for customers to run new systems in parallel for a period before switch over was to buy 1 year term licenses in order to remain compliant.

Cloud Alternatives

The current alternatives to Oracle’s cloud services are Amazon http://aws.amazon.com/oracle/ or Microsoft’s Azure.

Amazon Web Services and Oracle Amazon RDS for Oracle allows you to bring your own licences or use Oracle included licences. Costs start from 0.04 USD per hour for the on-demand licence included option which means that running an oracle application really is more affordable than ever. Bring you own licence starts at 0.025 USD. There does appear to be one downside of the licence included option and that is the database is Standard Edition 1. This could mean that applications that use Enterprise option will not be able to take advantage of this.

While this may not provide the licence subscription desirable for most enterprise applications, for developers this could be a more effective way to run proof of concepts.

What about cannibalisation of revenues?

One of the main criticisms of Oracle not being so quick to adopt subscription based licence models for Database and Middleware was the concerns about cannibalisation of its existing revenue streams.

Last month in the Oracle earnings call Oracle reported fiscal first-quarter profit and sales that were below analysts’ projections. Oracle also forecast Q2 revenues and profits below estimates. Oracle is investing in its cloud division and there is a big drive within Oracle to push managed cloud services with big incentives for its sales teams.

On the same call Safra Catz, Oracle co-CEO said,”As the movement to the cloud grows, we expect this transition will affect our revenue to the positive”.

See full earnings transcript on Seeking Alpha.So in summary , I welcome the announcements in OpenWorld 2014. It is a good start and it should provide some alternative flexible options for customers who want a subscription based pricing. This will present some organisational challenges especially around its sales division. Sure customers are going to continue to run software on premise but do Oracle really need all those sales people?

So what do you think? Does Oracle or even Amazon present a viable alternative now? Will you use it?

Thanks for Downloading this episode.

Thanks again for the feedback on the previous first episode. The sound quality was not great and we had a few bloopers.

I hope this recording is a little better. If you would like to contribute or have any Oracle licence questions please contact me via the contact page at Madora.co.uk or email me. [email protected]

Does 12c Multi-tenant offer real opportunity for cost savings through consolidation?

For those not familiar with Oracle 12c, which was released in June last year, it offers a host of new features. The ‘C’ in 12c stands for Cloud and it is focused firmly on providing a back bone for the Oracle Cloud strategy. With all the announcements around cloud, DBaaS, PaaS and the like, I thought it worthy of giving an introduction to Oracle 12c for the non technical – well not too technical. Some four years in development this was a major release with a fundamental new architecture. Oracle Database 12c provides a bunch of extras such as database consolidation, query optimisation, performance tuning, high availability, partitioning, backup and recovery.

Tom Kyte does a nice job of explaining the new features in YouTube for those who are a bit more technically minded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekTTXoHBmWw&feature=youtu.be

It is the database consolidation capability via pluggable databases that really are the game changer for consolidation. Officially now known as multi-tenant, this is a paid for option that could have a massive impact on the cost of building and running a large database estate.

So what is the multi-tenant option?

In simple terms I like to think of the Multi-tenant option as an egg box which is the container database, holding many eggs which are the pluggable databases. The egg box provides the ability to share its memory and background processes across the many eggs it holds. The egg box holds the metadata and the eggs hold the user data.

Traditional database architecture requires each database instance to have a discrete set of memory and storage allocated to it. Sometimes this results in poorly utilised resources. Clearly as your database estate grew you could find yourself buying more memory and storage on a regular basis. This also has an impact on management as more effort is required to manage and maintain the hardware infrastructure as well as the growing instances of databases. Add the non-production environments and the disaster recovery and backup options and the physical servers can soon sprawl.

One of the solutions pursued by a great number of organisations to the physical server sprawl was the use of virtualisation software. Although this has greater benefits in physical server reduction it still required each oracle database instance to have its own resources set aside.

Multi-tenant databases offer an additional level of consolidation by sharing the database resources amongst the pluggable databases. You can create up to 253 pluggable databases all managed as a single instance via the container database. That is one giant egg box! In production environments it is not uncommon to see 20 different instances all requiring routine maintenance from upgrades, patches, tuning, back up and configured for RAC and Data Guard. With Oracle 12c Multi-tenant all 20 instances can be treated as one. A DBA can easily plug or unplug an existing database to or from a container database. There is no need to change any code in the application. When the user connects to a plugged database, the database environment looks exactly as if the user had connected to a traditional database.

The Multi-tenant option helps provide the following:

High consolidation density: Many databases can share memory and background processes, reducing significant hardware.

Provisioning: A database can be unplugged from one environment and plugged into another in seconds using SQL commands. Spinning up and cloning new instances for test and dev is now a breeze.

Patching and upgrades: Patch a new container. Now unplug from the un-patched container and plug into the patch container – job done.

Manage many databases as one: Do your routine tasks like back up on the container database not individual instances. An order of magnitude when you consider a container can hold 253 databases!

Resource management: The Oracle Resource Manager feature can work at the pluggable database level for you to manage resource competition among the databases in your environment.

In the words of Oracle senior vice president Andy Mendelsohn, Pluggable databases represent “a fundamental rearchitecture of the [Oracle] database. Now if I’m an administrator, I have one database overall to administer.”

Can 12c really deliver substantial cost savings?

There is no denying there are cost benefits to be gained through increased agility via rapid cloning, reduced overheads in management and lower hardware infrastructure. It was a disappointment to a number of customers that this became a paid option. This cost should be offset by the lower demand for compute, storage hardware and people costs.

The elephant in the room though is the impact on licence costs. Seeing the real benefit of reduced licence fees will be a challenge. We all know how Oracle likes to safeguard its support revenues. Although a significant reduction in Database cores could result, this will need to be offset by the purchase of the 12c Multi-tenant option which is some 37% of the list price of Enterprise Edition. Even a recalculation of the support fees after dropping a number of database cores should make a contribution. I don’t know how many references Oracle has of customers using the 12c Multi-tenant option in anger. I guess not too many. I am sure that there is an opportunity for early adopters to make a good case to negotiate a great deal. Some serious analysis and modelling will be required to work through cost savings on existing deployments. Green field and new projects will be great candidates for Oracle 12c and you would be almost crazy not to use it.

So what do you think? Have you starting looking at 12c in terms of consolidation? Does it stack up?