Driving licence negotiations

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.