An Oracle licensing consultant on why she stopped trusting the layer between raw script output and a licence position — and what changed when the rules were driven by licensing experts and the raw data stayed visible.
Hazel Hopes was Certero’s Oracle licensing lead when this piece was first published in February 2021, with over twenty years in technology and nearly ten of them focused on Oracle licensing.
Here she explains how a consultant’s method changed as the technology underneath it changed — and why the Oracle work in CerteroX SAM has her support.
Having worked for SAM services companies in the past, I can truthfully say I believe Certero’s Oracle capability is the best I have seen, and a vast improvement on the traditional data collection medium of running scripts.
Let me explain why.
Before joining Certero, in past consultancy roles, I have been asked to take raw SQL script output, review it for completeness, analyse it and then produce the corresponding licence position.
That was always time-consuming to do manually. Imagine eleven individual CSV files per Oracle database instance: open one, look through it, extract the data, close it, move on to the next. Across five hundred instances that is over five thousand individual files. It took a lot of coffee to stay awake and finish.
Eventually the industry moved on and used a variety of data-crunching functions to do the same thing. But that just put another sandwich layer in between the raw data and the end result and — because I am a bit of a control freak — I always wanted the raw data to compare and contrast against. Nine times out of ten that was a wise decision, because these data-crunching tasks are run by people, and people make mistakes. Especially without the coffee.
Fundamentally, I do not trust anything that is not repeatable, and my experience of that sandwich layer surfaced too many inconsistencies for me to rely on it.
In recent years I have also been asked to analyse third-party output, nearly always without the benefit of seeing the actual system it came from, for the usual reasons of access and security. That could be confusing. I would get a file from the customer where the column headers did not match the data in the rows below; data would be incomplete or missing altogether; and only a validation exercise with the third party would eventually let me map it and sort it out.
So when I came to Certero I was understandably nervous about trusting the data. Within a short time I was running my own tests.
The earlier sandwich-layer approach meant I was reliant on somebody else knowing the rules. The rules change. The sandwich might not. Here the licensing rules are driven by licensing experts rather than by a data-crunching function, so there is an internal process I can follow to get new recognition into the product.
But ultimately, why I trust it comes down to repeatability. It is a stable, understandable, logical process, which means the results are exactly what I expect them to be. It is not meddlesome, either. It gets me the raw data I like so much, without altering it. Then it overlays the licensing rules and presents me with the outcome. I know what it is doing, and I know why.
Sometimes the platform and I will disagree. That is because I am a human (yes, really), so I can see where usage should be overridden based on what I know about a specific customer. These are things no product could possibly know. Perhaps the usage is covered by a third-party application licence, or excluded under a complex Oracle contract I have just been through with the customer. When that happens, I can override the out-of-the-box recognition and apply my own knowledge instead.
So I get the best of both worlds. I can trust the data, and I can still use my licensing skills to adapt it. Fortunately, none of this requires excessive caffeine consumption.
Hazel wrote that in 2021, and more of the judgement she describes now lives in the model rather than beside it.
CerteroX SAM handles Oracle options and packs with the underlying evidence and a per-item override, processor types and core factors, licence pools with hosting rights and geographic rules, cover-down logic for Enterprise Edition, uncapped quantity for unlimited agreements, and E-Business Suite responsibilities. There is an explicit Exclude From Licensing workflow for MSDN, development, training and second-use devices, so a decision like “this instance is covered by a third-party application licence” is recorded, evidenced and repeatable rather than applied by hand each time the position is rebuilt.
The effective licence position itself is computed continuously — purchased, used, available, required, variance and exposure — rather than reconciled at a point in time. Software usage is metered over a rolling ninety-day window, so a harvesting decision rests on evidence rather than on the last snapshot anyone took.
Hazel’s experience is typical of how the SAM consultant’s process evolved after a long period in which it had not changed much at all. Plenty of products came along and failed to improve the output, which is where the industry’s scepticism came from.
The need for a licensing expert has not gone anywhere. Somebody has to understand, verify and enter licence entitlement, and act on what the position shows. But the critical part — accuracy of inventory in modern environments, which means virtualisation and partitioning technologies — and the heavy-lifting data work in the middle do not need to be the laborious, risky, error-prone manual process they once were.
A system that is repeatable and consistent, and that still lets expertise be applied on top, is the sensible balance of human and technical effort in SAM.
Certero uses this technology-led approach to deliver SAM services, and also provides the platform to organisations with the resources to manage Oracle licensing in-house.
Certero is a verified third-party tool vendor with Oracle License Management Services. In practice that means Oracle’s audit team can accept data from Certero during an official audit, as an alternative to installing Oracle’s own measurement tools. The control stays with you: you see what was collected, you decide what to do about it, and you move from the traditional point-in-time consultancy exercise to sustained visibility of your own position.
CerteroX covers five disciplines on one data model — ITAM, SAM, SaaS Management, Cloud Management and AI Management — with dedicated licence engines for Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, SAP, Adobe and Salesforce.
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