The Challenge
A global logistics company with operations across Europe, North America, and Asia Pacific had grown through three acquisitions over four years. Each acquired company had brought its own Oracle estate: separate Oracle licences, separate CSI numbers, separate support contracts, and separate Oracle account teams. The combined entity had no consolidated Oracle licence position and no single Oracle contact who could speak to the entire estate.
Total Oracle spend across the combined group was $14.2M annually: $8.1M in Oracle Database EE annual support across 340 database instances, $2.3M in Oracle SE2, and $3.8M in Oracle Middleware (WebLogic, SOA Suite). The ITAM function had inventory data for each entity but had never produced a reconciled position. When Oracle's account team requested a "licence position review" as a precursor to an Enterprise Agreement renewal proposal, the ITAM team could not provide a coherent response — they had four separate ITAM datasets with no consistent methodology.
Oracle's EA proposal arrived six weeks later: $28M over five years, positioned as the solution to the company's licensing complexity. An Oracle EA can offer genuine value — but the pricing is based on Oracle's view of the customer's licence requirements. Oracle's model consistently overstates actual need. We were engaged to establish the true licence position before any EA discussion could proceed.
Our Approach
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Estate Discovery and CSI Consolidation
We consolidated licence entitlements across all acquired entities and the legacy estate into a single Oracle licence position. This required reconciling four CSI numbers, cross-referencing Order Forms against delivery confirmations, and identifying two instances where Oracle had licensed the same product to two entities in the same group under separate agreements — a situation Oracle never proactively flags, but which creates double-support costs. The reconciliation revealed the group was paying Oracle support on product licences it held twice.
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Processor Metric and Core Factor Analysis
With the entitlement position established, we conducted a deployment review of all 340 Oracle Database instances across 12 data centres. We applied Oracle's Core Factor Table to each server environment, calculated the Processor metric licence requirement for every deployment, and mapped those requirements against the entitlements held. The result: 31% of instances were running on platforms where the group held sufficient perpetual licences — but had been continuing to pay annual support, accumulating $2.1M per year in support charges for licences that could have been partially terminated.
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VMware Compliance Gap Analysis
Four of the company's European data centres ran Oracle Database EE on VMware vSphere clusters. Oracle's licensing policy requires that, where Oracle VM Manager is not used, all physical cores in a VMware cluster must be licensed regardless of where Oracle VMs are placed. The company had been licensing only the VM-allocated cores — a common mistake. The undisclosed compliance gap across two VMware clusters totalled $3.2M in unlicensed Processor metric entitlements. We designed a remediation path that physically separated Oracle workloads onto dedicated server pools, enabling correct Core Factor application and eliminating the gap without application migration.
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Redundant Support Identification
Three of the acquired companies had Oracle Database EE licences covering applications that had been decommissioned or migrated during post-acquisition integration. These licences were no longer deployed but continued generating annual Oracle support invoices — $2.1M per year in support for products that weren't running. ITAM tools had recorded the licences but had not flagged the decommissioning because the Oracle CSI records were in a separate system from the deployment inventory.
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EA Negotiation Position
With the true licence position documented and the consolidation roadmap defined, we engaged Oracle's EA negotiation with complete information. Oracle's $28M proposal was based on their model of the company's requirements — a model that overstated need by approximately 60%. Our counter-position, grounded in the consolidation analysis, reduced the EA proposal by $6.8M over five years and included contractual provisions for licence repatriation as the consolidation programme progressed.
The Results
Key Takeaways
- Post-acquisition Oracle estates contain significant duplicate entitlements that Oracle will never proactively identify or flag
- VMware consolidation of Oracle Database EE is the most common source of undisclosed Oracle compliance exposure
- Oracle support on decommissioned products continues until actively cancelled — ITAM hygiene directly affects the invoice
- Oracle account teams use estate complexity to accelerate EA proposals — establish the true position before any EA discussion
- Oracle's EA pricing is based on their model of your requirements — that model is consistently higher than reality
"We had no idea we were paying support on 80 database instances that were no longer deployed. The consolidation review paid for itself in the first month. The EA negotiation outcome was the best result we have achieved with Oracle in a decade."