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Do you have renewals coming up? We often see this as a time when the renewal fees are put into question. Here are five ways to reduce your Oracle support bill today.
Let’s look at these in turn.
We have two very credible companies Spinnaker and Rimini Street offering alternative Oracle support services, this is worth considering if you have large Oracle DB estates that are stable, mature and perhaps do not need upgrading. It may well be the applications are unlikely to be upgraded for some years yet. So terminating support or using one of the alternative support services could make significant savings. Used in combination with some of the other strategies could be interesting.
Well I dared to say it. Oracle is not the only relational DB in town. Microsoft SQL being the obvious alternative and is making strides where some would argue it is as good as Oracle DB. MYSQL although supported by Oracle is a free database with many large enterprises using it. I am hearing a lot about Postgresql as a viable alternative to Oracle DB, and having a procedural language similar to Oracle PLSQL, the migration of apps may not be as painful as you think. Of course for other newer use cases NoSQL DBs may be the way to go.
With a ever growing community of open source Databases to choose from. Moving ring fenced apps or using for new projects may be a tactic worth exploring. For ranking and comparison tables of commercial vs open source databases check out this link over at DB-Engines.com.
It’s no secret Oracle want you to move to their Cloud platform. The big push at the moment is converting some of you support fees into cloud credits. Now this could be a smart move, especially if you are coming up to a hardware refresh or looking to retire data centres. Most clients we work with have significantly large non-production environments. All running on hardware and not uncommonly running virtualisation software. With a 3:1 non-prod to prod that’s a lot of support being allocated to test / Dev and even DR.
Moving DR and Testing to Cloud could reduce your support by reallocating to cloud opex. Now your infrastructure costs such as Datacenter running costs and server support should go down. There is some opportunities here but it needs careful thought. The downside at the moment is Oracle are generally locking you into the cloud credits for 3 years.
Well we have been banging this drum for years. All too often client’s don’t have a grasp of the software assets that they are paying support on. Are you paying support on software that is just not being used anymore or could be purchased at a lower cost today? We wrote a series of blogs on the process of analysing your support to find opportunities to reduce the support fees.
For more detail on reviewing your Oracle licenses to reduce support, check out this series of blogs below.
https://madora.co.uk/paying-oracle-support-licences-part2/
https://madora.co.uk/reducing-oracle-support-fees-part-3/
Lots of options here. If you are coming up to a hardware refresh then it may be a useful exercise to see if you can rationalise and perhaps consolidate applications onto a more modern infrastructure. It is not uncommon to over-engineer the hardware and the result is lots of idle cores that are costing you licenses and hence ongoing support. Converged systems may offer some benefits in terms of costs.
So there you go. Five tactics to reduce your annual support bill. Using one or more in combination we believe is the answer. There are often many factors to consider, so why not talk to Madora. We have helped many client’s understand the opportunities to reduce support and can guide you every step of the way. A quick chat with us can give you an idea of options.
Kay Williams
Marketing Manager, Madora Consulting