October 22, 2019
Oracle licensing is extremely complex and ever-changing. Keeping on top of Oracle licence rules and their impacts on your business can be as difficult as it is frustrating.
Our Oracle licensing experts are here to help…
If you want to understand Oracle licensing then getting a firm grasp of the basics is the obvious place to start. This article provides an overview of Oracle licensing to help build your knowledge and understanding in the following three core areas:
- Deployment Environments
- Support
- Oracle Licensing for user and device models
If you prefer a PDF copy of this article for future reference, you can download a copy via the button below.
Alternatively, for help with your Oracle licensing challenges, why not speak to one of our experts today?
Deployment Environments
Development
Within a development environment, you may use any Oracle products and licences provided you download them from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN), which requires you to agree to an OTN Development Licence. As you may expect, this is a limited licence that gives you the right to develop applications using licensable Oracle products, but not to deploy them.
The OTN Development Licence places restrictions on what you can do and is not part of the Oracle Licence and Services Agreement (OLSA). For example, only one person may use the downloaded products for development, and that work must be performed on only one server. Products downloaded from the OTN may not be used for any other activity, internal data processing, or commercial or production use.
Test
All the Oracle products you use in your Test environment are subject to the same licensing requirements as Production environments. Essentially, this means you must have sufficient licences under the OLSA or another valid Oracle licensing agreement.
Production
All Oracle products used in your Production environment must be licensed, either through the OLSA or some other type of Oracle licensing agreement. To gain full visibility of your Oracle application, database and middleware deployments in these three environments, you need a solution like Certero for Oracle, which will help you find, identify and understand usage of your Oracle software.
Support
Oracle support contracts can be provided under perpetual or subscription licences. If you have perpetual licences, your support will be charged separately per year. With a support agreement in place you can contact Oracle directly for assistance and have the rights to use almost all the latest versions of Oracle’s software, including all previous versions that are still supported. For some Oracle products, your support agreement may not give you the rights to use them so you should always check your terms and conditions.
Oracle support agreements add an additional layer of complexity to understanding your Oracle licensing. This is largely due to historically agreed terms and conditions still being valid and active today. You should not rely on your invoices to understand what your licences entitle you to use, as support invoices do not convey all the complexities you need to understand.
For subscription licensing, support is provided as standard. However, once your subscription period ends, so too does your support agreement and your rights to use Oracle’s software. With Certero for Oracle you can store your Oracle support contracts and build a calendar of all your licence renewals.
Oracle Licensing
Unlimited Licence Agreements
Oracle licensing is based on the foundation of Unlimited Licence Agreements (ULA). These are time based but unlimited use rights, which cover certain subsets of Oracle products. At the end your ULA period, you have to declare your usage of these products to Oracle, along with a count of the number of user licences you need. You are then granted the licences for the products covered by the ULA.
Processor Licensing
Where your users cannot be counted or verified, Oracle uses processor licensing. An example of when this might occur is web applications. These are hosted in environments where counting your user licences is difficult. To calculate your licences you can multiply the total number of cores of the processors used, by a core processor licensing factor. The core processor licensing factor is specified on your Oracle Processor Core Factor Table, which you should be able to locate in your Oracle contract’s terms and conditions. Payment is ‘per processor’ used to run your Oracle software. However, Oracle has a specific definition of what a ‘processor’ is, which may not mirror the definition used by your hardware vendor.
If you are licensing your Oracle products under Standard Edition One or Standard Edition, a processor is defined as equivalent to a socket. However, if you have multi-chip modules, each chip is defined as equivalent to a socket. If you have Named User Plus licences (see User Licensing below), Product Minimums come into play. Minimums are per processor and calculated after the number of processors requiring licences has been determined.
Processor licensing is not offered if you are using Personal Edition Oracle products.
User Licensing
Oracle user-based licensing covers the individuals and devices that have the ability to access your Oracle software, irrespective of their active usage.
Named User Plus (NUP) is the main user-based licence and is available some Oracle products. Under this licence, automatic batching of data from computer-to-computer is permitted. What this means is if you store data in one relational database and then batch it to your data warehouse that uses Oracle technology, you (as a user of the first database) are not considered a named user of the data warehouse.
It is important to note, NUP licensing can only be used in countable environments to cover your employees, contractors or internally used applications. Many Oracle customers use this licence type for development and test environments.
In the past, Oracle did have another licence type called Named User, but it is no longer available for new customers. However, it may still be part of your existing Oracle licensing agreements. Essentially this licence covers individuals within your organization who have been authorized to use your Oracle software, irrespective of whether they are actively using it. These people can be employees or contractors, but also customers who may use your Oracle products either directly or indirectly via other applications. If you have non-human devices in your architecture, such as sensors or other IoT technology, these may also need to be counted as named users.
Named User Licensing
Named User Licensing limits the number of individuals who are authorized to use Oracle on any of your servers. This type of licence is no longer available to new customers but may be part of your existing Oracle licensing agreements.
Named User Plus Licensing
Named User Plus licensing is charged per user, where a user is defined as any ‘end-node’ that receives or creates data from an Oracle database. This can include humans or systems and as part of this licence, you must adhere to the Oracle User Minimums rule.
Device Licensing
Concurrent Device Licensing
Concurrent Device (CD) licences are no longer available to new customers but again, they may be part of your existing Oracle licensing agreements. Essentially, these licences are defined by Oracle as ‘the maximum amount of input devices connected to the designated system at any given point in time’. There is also a Network Licence version.
Application Specific Full Use
Application Specific Full Use (ASFU) licences are sold by Oracle Solution Providers in conjunction with third party application packages. An example may include purchasing an Oracle ASFU licence from SAP AG to allow you to use Oracle with a system such as SAP/R3. The subsequent licence is application specific and cannot be used for anything else.
Getting a grip on Oracle Licensing
There’s no escaping that Oracle licensing can be very complex and difficult to understand. There are many subtleties and nuances that impact licensing and costs, which are ever changing. This article only scratches the surface and there are many more layers of complexity underneath. For a more comprehensive guide, download our Oracle Licence Optimisation white paper.
To take control of your Oracle licensing, you have a number of options to choose from:
Go it alone
If you have good Oracle licensing knowledge in-house, you might decide that you know enough to be able to optimise your Oracle licensing position internally. If you choose this option, you’ll still need a technology that gives you full visibility of the deployed Oracle software and databases, and we would recommend storing the licence entitlements, contracts and support documentation centrally for easier reference at the point of a true-up or audit. Take a look at Certero for Oracle for more information on Oracle inventory and licence management.
How can Certero help you?
Left unmanaged, one of two things will happen with your Oracle spend. Either you will over-spend as you consume too much software and fail to optimise the deployed databases and applications. Or you will face a financial shock when an Oracle audit or licence review shows how much Oracle you’re really using and what it’s going to cost you.
If you have in-house Oracle licensing experts you will be able to use an Oracle SAM solution, like Certero for Oracle, to manage your Oracle investments. However, if you do not have Oracle licence specialists with the skills and experience required to use such a tool, Certero can provide a SAM managed service.
Whether you purchase your own tools for in-house delivery or outsource to a partner, your objective is to fully discover and inventory all your Oracle deployments. This will give you total visibility of your Oracle estate so you can manage your life cycles, consumption and licences.
With Certero for Oracle, once you have completed your inventory and discovery project, your estate is automatically updated in real-time to give you full visibility of all your Oracle assets and help you achieve your objectives. Similarly, with Certero’s SAM managed services our Oracle licensing specialists can provide you with all of this information, along with expert advice and guidance to help you avoid the dangers and maximise the value from your Oracle ULA.
If you want to know more about how Certero can help you, contact our team today.
