Case Study – Oracle Licensing Assessment – European Manufacturer – Oracle Database & Middleware
Background: A large manufacturing company in Europe (Italy) ran numerous in-house applications on Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic servers.
The environment expanded across multiple plants and business units, resulting in duplicate licenses and inefficient use of Oracle resources.
Challenges: Our Oracle license assessment found:
- Over-Provisioning: Over 150 database instances were deployed, many for development or testing with Enterprise Edition licenses that weren’t actually needed (Standard Edition would suffice in some cases). This resulted in excess licensing and support for “shelfware” – paying for support on idle or redundant databases.
- Compliance Gaps: Some WebLogic Server instances were set up in clusters without considering Oracle’s requirement to license all physical cores in the cluster, resulting in a licensing gap.
- Fragmented Contracts: Different divisions had separate Oracle support contracts, resulting in missed volume discounts and duplicate entitlements.
Solution: We delivered a license optimization roadmap to streamline their Oracle usage:
- Environment Rationalization: We consolidated databases, retiring or merging dozens of low-use instances. Several workloads were downgraded to Oracle Standard Edition where appropriate, since their usage (CPU and features) fell within SE limits, eliminating the need for higher-cost Enterprise licenses.
- Middleware Optimization: Re-architected WebLogic deployments to use fewer physical hosts (leveraging virtualization where allowed under Oracle policy) so that the middleware could be fully licensed with existing entitlements. Unused middleware components were shut down.
- Support Consolidation: Combined the Oracle support contracts of multiple business units into a single unified agreement to leverage a volume discount and eliminate duplicate support fees.
Outcome:
The manufacturer achieved full compliance with zero net new licenses required – all identified license gaps were closed through reallocation and technical fixes. This structured remediation eliminated an estimated multi-million Euro compliance risk before any Oracle audit could escalate.
Equally important, the company realized a 25% reduction in annual Oracle support costs by terminating support for decommissioned systems and securing better terms on the consolidated contract. (In one comparable case, a company was able to eliminate $5M in risk through such optimizations and cut support costs by $300K.)
The European manufacturer now operates a leaner Oracle footprint with governance in place to prevent overspending.
Read about our Oracle Licensing Assessment Service.
