15Jan 07
Driving licence negotiations
Posted by Steven Deare @ 17:29 1 comments
Oracle and SAP customers will soon have to negotiate new licensing models with changes to both vendors' plans on the way.
This week I spoke to SAP Australia user group (SAUG) representative Paul Hawking on what the organisation wants from SAP's upcoming announcements around licensing changes, whatever they may be.
Interestingly, Oracle just last month announced new licensing models across all its applications, aimed at consistency.
Consistency was one of Hawking's hopes for SAP. He said SAP at least needed a consistent set of product names in order to save customers the constant change in following what's called what.
There's no doubt licensing is hard to follow with any major vendor, especially with Web services spawning new products all the time, but how happy are the vendors to answer your questions?
This has been a sore point in recent times for SAUG, according to Hawking.
Are some vendors harder to negotiate with than others when it comes to licensing?
Finally, if you're a customer of both Oracle and SAP, are there lessons each could learn from the other?
Let us know your thoughts.
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I have made a study of Oracle's latest Application pricing changes and believe that the challenge is not the ability to understand the latest change in policy, but rather a customers ability to (i) applying the correct ratio & mix of the three licensing models and (ii) understanding how to "roll in" or migrate their existing licenses. This decision & ability to navigate through these nuances could not just make a huge difference in the up-front license costs but also the ongoing annuity maintenance costs - which of course is more important.