Answer Yes or No to each of the following 10 questions. Add up your scores to find out if you need our help.
It is no secret that Oracle LMS roll through customers on a periodic basis. You are particularly at risk if you have not bought anything for the last 2 years and if you have not been reviewed in the last 3 years. You may be approached by Oracle Sales to fill in a server worksheet. This is not a formal review, but could turn into one. Below is a list of scenarios that Oracle particularly look for, and may ask you about when they hold that initial first meeting. So be prepared and run through these items to check your situation.
User minimums are often misunderstood. See the licensing minimums blog article for more details: http://madora.co.uk/oracle-licensing-user-minimums-how-much-is-your-organisation-exposed-part-1/
Check you have the correct licence type e.g. standard contracts are for internal use only. Hosting or embedded licences are different so your contracts, may not cover some of your customer facing applications. Please let us know if this is a topic of particular interest or concern to you.
“Multiplexing is when a large number of end users and/or devices access a system via an interface, such as a transaction processing monitor or a web server product, so that the apparent number of users and/or devices accessing the system is much smaller than the actual number of users and/or devices. If Oracle software is part of an environment in which multiplexing hardware or software is used, then all users and/or devices must be licensed at the multiplexing front end.”
See http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/sig.pdf
Please note multiplexing is particularly an issue when running Oracle products to underpin vendor applications, what Oracle calls ISVs. These have been a target for Oracle in the past as more often than not they are incorrectly licensed due to a lack of understanding of the multiplexing rule.
Remember every interface to an Oracle database counts as a user. We have seen this as a major issue in the financial services sector in particular.