Oracle will manage your BYOL compliance for you…
Oracle are moving increasingly towards being a subscription-based company and have identified Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) as their big bet for the future – getting customer organisations off boring on-premises agreements and onto exciting cloud agreements.
Despite the $179 billion spent on IaaS & PaaS in 2021, hybrid cloud is the prevalent scenario for many organisations and this includes hybrid licensing aka Bring Your Own Licensing (BYOL). Using your on-premises licenses in cloud environments has many advantages but does also require additional management:
- How many of our licenses are being utilised in the cloud?
- What is the underlying cloud infrastructure they’ve been applied to?
- Have there been any changes to the infrastructure?
- Are all the licenses eligible for cloud use?
Tracking this (and more) is a growing area of focus for SAM tool vendors and Microsoft & Amazon have been adding to their built-in capabilities too. In another effort to increase OCI’s status in the cloud vendor rankings, and its appeal to customers, Oracle have now introduced “License Manager for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure”.
How does it work?
It’s a free service within OCI that will track both Oracle and third-party software BYOL usage. It will:
- Automate the BYOL license portability rules found in the “Oracle PaaS and IaaS Universal Credits Service Descriptions” document found here.
- Track utilization of licenses – Oracle and third-party
- Alert on under/over-used licenses and expiry dates
The Oracle post mentions that you can only use OCPUS (Oracle CPUs) as your metric, so you need to “work with your vendor” to translate any license terms between the two publishers. I’m sure that won’t turn into a cloud cross-sell opportunity for many of them!
Is it a good idea?
There will be high levels of scepticism among ITAM professionals about allowing Oracle this sort of insight & control when it comes to your licensing compliance position. However, I don’t think it’s really aimed at them (you), although the post does mention SAM a couple of times. I think this is more for the non-ITAM/SAM people who are managing BYOL licenses which, according to the latest Flexera State of the Cloud report – is the case almost 90% of the time.
If your organisation uses (or is planning to use) OCI, it would be prudent to understand more about this – particularly how will it affect your position in audits?
You can read about other OCI considerations in our recent article here.
Further Reading
Oracle License Manager announcement
Guide to Oracle Cloud Licensing
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