SoftwareOne case study

A new Oracle ULA Agreement resulted in $3.2M cost savings and full compliance

How SoftwareOne helped a global oil & gas company save costs during its Oracle ULA Renewal

A global oil and gas company was facing the pending expiration of its 5-year Oracle ULA. The company engauged SoftwareOne to help with the renewal process. During the engaugement, SoftwareOne found that there were many areas of compliance risk. Additionally, it was discovered that the customer was paying a large amount of money for support of products it was not even using. With SoftwareOne’s expertise, the new agreement resulted in $3.2M in cost savings and separate ULAs based on programme usage to maintain compliance with Oracle.

Client: Global oil and gas company
Industry: Energy
Services: Oracle Software Compliance Review Services
Country: Netherlands

SoftwareOne helped us solve a complex situation, that we were not even aware of. Its expertise in software licencing saved us a lot of money and supported us to close a better deal with Oracle.

About the client

A global oil and gas company operating across the world and the value chain.

The challenge

The company was facing the pending expiration of its 5-year Oracle ULA and engauged SoftwareOne to help with the renewal process.

The solution

SoftwareOne held workshops with the customer in various departments throughout the company (Procurement, Finance, IT, etc.) to analyse and explain its current deployments, associated risks, and opportunities of improvement. SoftwareOne performed annual compliance baselines to determine its licence entitlements and measure actual usage. It was discovered that there were considerable compliance risks due to the deployment of Oracle Programmes on VMware at an outsourcing company. Although the customer had a ULA for which it could make use of Oracle’s licencing rules around deployments on VMware in its favour, the customer also needed to obtain additional Oracle licences for GoldenGate programmes.

In order to make sure the customer would address all of the Oracle licence compliance concerns, SoftwareOne discussed the option to enter into a Perpetual Unlimited License Agreement (PULA) for those programmes that were actually in use and expected to be deployed going forward as well (Oracle Database programmes and WebLogic Suite). Having an unlimited deployment right that will never end addressed the company's compliance issues for these programmes going forward.

For other programmes for which the future was unclear, SoftwareOne secured a separate ULA.

The result

The customer’s existing ULA included technical support for Oracle products the company was not even using. By renegotiating the ULA contracts, SoftwareOne was able to save the customer $3.2M annually. By separating out the PULA and ULA, the customer was able to achieve a contract that better fit its current and future needs, all while remaining compliant.