Managing your Oracle ULA – Planning

We’ve got an Oracle ULA

Congratulations, your organization has negotiated and signed an Oracle Unlimited License Agreement(Oracle ULA). It’s a lot of money but you have done the projections for the coming three to five years, gotten input from all the stakeholders and negotiated what you believe is the best deal for the right mix of products. All products are not included in the Oracle ULA, they never are, but for the products you were unsure about you’ve negotiated a price hold. The remaining products, current and future, you’ll just have to be careful when using them. The temptation at this point is to breathe a sigh of relief and forget about Oracle licensing until six months before you need to certify your Oracle ULA. This would be both an opportunity lost and a significant risk to the organization. With a little planning and regular action you can ensure your organization gets the maximum value from this IT investment while ensuring compliance and avoiding any unbudgeted expense. Here are some tips to help you in planning your enterprise license optimization programme:

Start Early

Three years might seem a long way away but it passes quickly. Projects that require enterprise licenses, which is what Oracle products are, typically run from six months to a year. You will need time to deploy products under the ULA and to reduce products not covered.

Communicate

The only way you can encourage usage of the right products and avoid usage of the wrong ones is regular communication. This will start with an awareness campaign, followed by regular progress and compliance reporting over the period. An Oracle ULA is a strategic investment so the heads of all departments should be updated, not just IT.

Create a Project

To ensure you hit the levels of usage you projected at the start of the Oracle ULA have a plan. Deployment goals broken down by quarter, a sponsor, a project manager, a budget, objectives, accountability, etc. Everything that goes into planning any project. You must proactively optimize your Oracle ULA if you are to get the The affordable affordablehealth.info exchanges opened on Oct, 1st 2013 and offer affordable health affordablehealth.info and subsidies to low and middle income families and small businesses. maximum value during the period and for many years after.

Monitor, Measure and Report

To keep up the momentum and to ensure you hit the planned targets you need to regularly monitor deployment, measurement progress (planned versus actual) and hold the various departments in your organization accountable through progress reports. Quarterly reports circulated widely, is a proven method.

Resource

It will take time and specialized skills to both deploy and uninstall Oracle products. You should budget for this as part of the ULA budget or at the very least as part of the annual IT budget. You will also need to get external advice, especially around Oracle licensing , optimization options and what is allowed under your contract.

Tools

You will need appropriate tools to find and measure your deployment of Oracle products. To tools must have the ability to find new installations, measure the correct license metrics and report them in a way that makes sense to the SAM team. Whatever mix of tools you go for, they must be capable of scanning your network on a quarterly basis without impact to operations or with significant effort of they simply won’t be used.

More on managing Oracle ULA

In a future post we will discuss the Team and Communication that needs to be in place to successfully manage your Oracle ULA

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Piaras MacDonnell