Staying Compliant—How a South-American Retailer Removed $12 Million of Oracle Risk and Secured $250 Million in Perpetual Rights
Company at a Glance
| Sector | Multi-brand retail – groceries, fashion, home goods |
| Footprint | 8 Latin-American countries, 105 000 employees |
| Oracle Estate | Database EE, WebLogic, and several add-on packs spread across on-prem VMware, AWS, Azure, and thousands of store devices |
| Agreement in Play | 3-year Unlimited Licence Agreement (ULA) ending in 4 months |
Why They Needed Help
- Hidden liabilities
A quick internal scan suggested the company might owe US$ $12 million if Oracle audited its cloud and virtual-machine deployments under today’s accounting rules. - Poor visibility
Regional IT teams spun up servers as needed, so headquarters had no single view of what was running or whether the ULA covered it. - Clock ticking
The Oracle ULA was about to expire. If they could not prove compliance, Oracle could bill them for the shortfall or pressure them to renew on costly terms.
What We Did
Goal: Leave the ULA with zero compliance exposure and keep every licence possible—without paying Oracle another fee.
- Mapped Every Oracle Installation
- Pulled logs from vCenter, AWS, Azure, and point-of-sale systems.
- Built one clean list of 7,853 Oracle instances, each tagged as “in-scope” or “out-of-scope.”
- Calculated Real-World Risk
- Applied both the 2019 contract rules and the stricter 2025 rules to see worst-case exposure.
- Confirmed the $12 million figure, mostly tied to WebLogic nodes that were idle or oversized.
- Fixed the Gaps
- VMware: Pinned Oracle VMs to designated hosts so only those CPUs counted.
- Cloud: Switched to smaller, more efficient AWS/Azure shapes and added “Bring-Your-Own-Licence” tags.
- Clean-up: Uninstalled stray Oracle components (e.g., Internet Directory) that the ULA did not cover.
- Created an Audit-Ready Dossier
- A 160-page workbook showing before-and-after configurations, CPU counts, and the contract clauses that backed our position.
- Owned the Conversation with Oracle
- Delivered the dossier, answered Oracle’s follow-up questions, and closed the file within 60 days.
Results
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Compliance gap eliminated | US $12 million → US $0 |
| Perpetual licences secured | US $250 million (based on list prices) |
| Licence headroom | 33 % above current peak use |
| Extra fees paid to Oracle | None |
| Time to certify | 60 days (22 days before ULA expiry) |
What Made It Work
- One source of truth – A single inventory stops finger-pointing between regions and suppliers.
- Fix, then report – Remediated risks before Oracle saw them, so the final picture was clean.
- Contract first, policies second – Used the 2019 agreement wording to prevent retroactive charges.
- Governance baked in – Tags and CPU-pinning policies now deploy automatically, so future audits start from a compliant state.
CIO Reflection
“We always assumed our ULA kept us safe, but the details could have cost us millions. The project gave us a clear map of every Oracle server, proved we were compliant, and let us keep a quarter-billion dollars in perpetual rights—all without another cheque to Oracle. It’s the best audit outcome we’ve ever had.”
Do you need to get your own Oracle estate under control? Let’s discuss a compliance-first roadmap that removes surprises and locks in value.
