I am sitting here at my desk after hanging up with a client and taking a much needed deep breath after hearing the words – “We talked with Oracle and they said it was ok,” or even better, “Oracle offered to come in and review our licenses and help us determine if we are paying too much.”
The Oracle sales team has one purpose and that is to sell you more licenses. The support department has two purposes, to support you and make sure you keep paying for your support. The audit department has a goal of determining compliance in hope that they will be able to have an outcome that generates revenue. The list goes on and on, but the common theme is that no one at the company has incentive to save you money, in fact, its quite the opposite.
You might ask yourself, why wouldn’t I want Oracle to do this for me? They said it is free and that they might be able to show me how to save money on my contracts. The answer is simple, a health check is a soft or hidden audit. The purpose is to determine if you are out of compliance to either get you to buy more licensing or to collect enough data to officially audit you. I have seen the sales team come back after a health check and tell a client they are out of compliance and they need to make a purchase in order to avoid an audit, and they deliver this message in a pretty aggressive manner.
I have also seen the health check team (License Management Services – LMS) just come back with a compliance finding and tell you that you have 30 days to comply. In our 16 years of experience, I have yet to hear a client say that Oracle’s health check saved them money. For example, one of my clients allowed Oracle to come in to do a health check to determine if they wanted to entertain a license metric change. After collecting all of the data for the exercise, LMS sent an audit finding report to the team that showed a $100M fine and they then told the client to talk with their sales rep to resolve the findings. In this case we were able to guide the client to dispute the finding since the exercise was not based on an audit and LMS pulled data that had nothing to do with the exercise. Also, in order for Oracle to audit a client, they must follow their contractual obligation of providing advanced written notice. After connecting with us, the end result was that the client paid Oracle nothing and came away with a better understanding of how Oracle works.
The largest take away from this is to never have Oracle perform any type of license check where they would audit your licenses and your overall licensing use. You are under no obligation to even talk with your Oracle account rep, unless you need to discuss a necessary purchase. Oracle’s sales teams may call you, request meetings, offer health checks and try to push any other method to get information out of you but just be aware that you don’t have to take accept those meetings or calls.
If you do want a health check for peace of mind that you are compliant, work with a firm that in unbiased in the result. Oracle would love to find a gap within your company so they can sell you more licenses. Oracle resellers that also do consulting are not safe to work with, as they collect for both the health check and the potential sale. Do your diligence to know what you have, where you have it installed and what impact it might have if you are using virtual technologies such as VMware. As always, we are here to help and are completely unbiased!
