Case Study – Oracle Licensing Assessment – Latin American Financial Group – Oracle Database & Middleware
Background: A financial services group in Mexico, with banking and insurance subsidiaries, depended on Oracle databases and middleware for its internal applications. They suspected they were overspending on Oracle support and engaged us to assess their license usage for optimization opportunities.
Challenges: Our Oracle licensing assessment revealed a dual problem of excess and deficiency:
- Shelfware & Overspending: The company was paying Oracle support for licenses of products no longer in use – essentially, shelfware consuming the budget. This was especially true for certain middleware components and older database versions that had been decommissioned but were still included in support contracts.
- Compliance Gaps: Conversely, in some active systems, the group had unintentionally exceeded their licensed quantities. For example, an internal analytics project had spawned several Oracle Database instances on new servers without additional licenses, creating a compliance gap that had gone unnoticed.
Solution: The approach combined cost-cutting and risk mitigation:
- Thorough Inventory & Alignment: We performed an inventory true-up to ensure every deployed Oracle instance is matched with a valid license. Unused licenses were identified and set aside for termination or reuse. At the same time, unlicensed deployments were catalogued for remediation.
- Reharvesting & Reuse: In some cases, we can reallocate surplus licenses from decommissioned systems to cover shortfalls in active systems, thereby avoiding new purchases. (In one instance, a subsidiary had idle Oracle Standard Edition licenses that were reassigned to license a development environment elsewhere.)
- Support Contract Optimization: We collaborated with the client’s procurement team to eliminate the identified shelfware from Oracle support renewals, resulting in immediate cost savings. We also negotiated with Oracle to apply credits for the removed products toward other needs and secured a multi-year renewal with no annual support uplift on the remaining portfolio.
Outcome: This engagement achieved 100% compliance across the Oracle estate while simultaneously reducing support costs by 40%, which is at he upper end of our target range. The compliance gap that could have led to hefty fees was closed without buying new licenses by using what they already owned more effectively.
On the support side, eliminating unused licenses and negotiating terms resulted in approximately $2 million in annual savings. (This mirrors another case where an Oracle review found $2M/year in support spend on unused software and uncovered a major compliance issue – both of which were addressed to save money and avoid tens of millions in risk.)
The Latin American financial group not only avoided a potential audit crisis but also freed up significant IT budget, demonstrating the value of proactive license management.
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