The benefits of properly managing your oracle licensing needs
Oracle’s software licensing is a complex minefield to navigate due to the regular changes in license metrics, as a result of Oracle’s new product’s and business acquisitions in recent years. For this reason, properly managing your Oracle licensing needs and keeping track of the changes that affect your organisation is more beneficial than it ever has been before.
The aim of this article is to demonstrate these benefits, focussing especially on how properly managing your Oracle Licensing can make dealing with an Oracle Audit much easier and avoid the chance of incurring fees due to not complying with your license.
Many users will try and rely on the invoices they receive from Oracle’s support services (which you can learn more about here would be changed to the actual blog address when it was published]) to try and understand their license grant. However, simply reading your invoice will not give you a complete picture of the ways in which you use Oracle software and the nuances of license agreements that you are complying with. For this reason, proper license management is necessary.
Proper management prepares you for an audit
What is an Oracle License Audit?
Whenever you install an Oracle program, whether as an individual or as a corporation, you agree to the terms and conditions of a license agreement. This license agreement provides Oracle with the permission to perform an audit.
As part of an audit, you will be requested to complete an overview with the details of your IT infrastructure. This might include running various scripts on your servers. Once they have finished their tests, they will take the completed overview and the log files with them for analysis purposes.
If they find there are any pieces of software that you are using without the correct license, you will be asked to pay for the necessary licenses to become compliant. If you agree to this measure, the process should end there.
However, if you don’t agree to, or fail to cooperate with an official Oracle audit; it will be considered as a material breach of the license agreement resulting in legal steps from Oracle’s side.
Making an Audit go smoothly
With proper license management though, an audit should be a routine check-up and all your licenses should have been paid for.
When you receive the notification letter about being selected for an Oracle license audit, it will give you 45 day’s notice since the letter was written.
During this time, a well-managed organisation will assign a single point of contact for the audit, coordinating your side of the audit and making sure the Oracle licenses have been managed as best as possible.
The benefit of properly managing your Oracle Licenses
If you have been keeping good, complete, and accurate records of your Oracle software deployments, and you have properly managed your licenses, 45 days should be ample time to respond to the audit request.
You can learn more about Oracle Licensing from this helpful quick start guide if you need more information.
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