News roundup - September/October 2022

ITAM News & Analysis

News roundup - September/October 2022

Big fine for Ford. Oracle and Microsoft launch new products, and Adobe sheds Pantone. Here’s your ITAM news roundup for September and October 2022.

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Ford hit with $105 million fine for software licensing breach – from an industry-specific software provider

Ouch. Ford has been ordered to pay Versata Software Inc $104.6 million in damages for breaching a 2004 licensing contract and “misappropriating trade secrets.” The long-running dispute with Versata Software began in April 2015, when Ford sought a court order that it did not infringe Versata’s intellectual property. Versata was awarded 85% of the damages sought after a 15-day trial in Detroit.

Ford has said it will appeal the verdict. Read more here.

Pantone no more: Adobe to phase out Pantone colours 

From November 2022, only 3 Pantone Colour books will be available within Adobe Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop – any more than this will need to be licensed directly from Pantone.

While this may not be a huge issue initially (this Adobe forum thread suggests they’ll still be accessible for free) it is worth being aware of as it surely points to future shenanigans. 

Oracle launches SAM Verified Partner Program and several new products

Oracle made a number of announcements during this year’s CloudWorld 2022, including details of their new SAM Verified Partner program. There was no press release, so details are scant at this stage.

From what we can gather, in contrast to the JPE (Joint Partner Engagement) program where Oracle audits are run by Oracle partners, the SAM Verified Partner program will be targeted towards ongoing license management rather than audits. It is unclear however how it will interact/overlap with Oracle’s Software Investment Advisory (SIA) team whose remit is to provide non-audit-related Oracle licensing support.

Product announcements focused on the cloud business intelligence and analytics stack, with new features added to the core Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) platform and additional analytics use cases for Oracle Fusion Analytics.

Microsoft makes multiple Azure changes

Following shortly on from making some of its biggest licensing changes in years, Microsoft has added two new elements to Azure Hybrid Benefit, which is a “licensing benefit that helps you to significantly reduce the costs of running your workloads in the cloud. It works by letting you use your on-premises Software Assurance-enabled Windows Server and SQL Server licences on Azure. And now, this benefit applies to RedHat and SUSE Linux subscriptions too.”

The changes enable organisations to use their Windows Server licensing to cover Azure Stack HCI (read more) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) (more here).

It has also introduced Azure Savings Plans – a new way of obtaining discounted rates on your Azure spend by committing on an hourly basis. These can be applied across the following and are available on Enterprise Agreements, Microsoft Customer Agreements, and Microsoft Partner Agreements: 

• Virtual Machines 
• Dedicated Hosts
• Containers
• Azure premium functions
• Azure app services

Further reading: Optimize and maximize cloud investment with Azure savings plan for compute

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