Application Specific Full Use licences are Oracle software sold through a partner and locked to that partner's application. What qualifies, who carries the support obligation, who carries the compliance risk, and why ASFU customers can face two different audit routes.
An Oracle ASFU licence — Application Specific Full Use — is a restricted licence type sold by an Oracle technology partner or solutions provider (SAP, for example) to be used in conjunction with a specific, defined, partner-owned application.
That restriction is the whole character of the licence. Oracle software obtained under ASFU can only be used in conjunction with the specified third-party application. It must not be used separately without additional licensing, and that applies both to the application owner and to the eventual end user.
Organisations planning to use Oracle software this way are required to join the Oracle Partner Network and to maintain that membership for the duration of the ASFU agreement. They also agree to the Oracle Partner Network Master Distribution Agreement and its addendum, the Application Specific Full Use Program Distribution agreement.
They are asked to define the “application package” itself using the appropriate registration form, and each application package requires a distinct and separate registration form.
To qualify for ASFU, the third-party application must be commercially available to multiple end users — not, for example, exclusive to a certain type of user or group — and must have end-user documentation.
It is also the application owner’s responsibility to ensure the end-user agreement they hold with their own customers includes some very specific clauses. Among them: making end users aware of the Oracle program usage restrictions, acknowledging Oracle’s intellectual property rights in its programs, and preventing the end user from giving away or transferring programs to anyone else.
Because the ASFU licence is part of a third-party application, technical support responsibility transfers to that third party — the application owner. This in turn requires the third party to have maintained their own technical support with Oracle, so that all patches and updates are included for the Oracle programs covered by the ASFU.
Maintenance on ASFU licences can be managed through the provider as described above. If the end user would rather maintain the licences themselves, they can be migrated to Full Use at an additional cost from Oracle.
ASFU agreements can be complex, with clauses and definitions that must be fully understood for each partner and customer and then communicated to end users to ensure compliance. It is also likely that Oracle software covered by an ASFU licence will be restricted in which features can be enabled — management packs being the obvious example. Getting this wrong creates Oracle compliance problems.
That said, as long as the end user fully abides by the ASFU software usage terms, the responsibility for compliance with the ASFU conditions will usually rest with the Oracle partner. It is their responsibility to understand how and where Oracle software can be used within their application in accordance with the ASFU terms.
Even so, it is time-consuming and distracting to have to manage an audit without the right inventory and licensing information to hand.
It is also worth noting that Oracle approaches ASFU audits separately from “standard” in-house audits. Customers who are both ASFU partners and Oracle end users in their own right therefore carry the risk of two different audit routes, run against two different sets of terms, potentially over the same infrastructure.
The compliance obligation may sit with the partner, but the measurement burden falls wherever the software is installed. Answering an ASFU question means being able to demonstrate three things about each Oracle deployment:
Certero is a verified third-party tool vendor for Oracle License Management Services. In Certero’s own published wording: “Being a verified 3rd party toolset means that Oracle’s audit team can accept data from Certero for Oracle during an official audit, as an alternative to installing Oracle License Management measurement tools.” That product is now CerteroX SAM.
If you hold Oracle under ASFU, alongside Full Use, or both at once, talk to us about what your measurement position would need to look like before either audit route opens.
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