The impact moving to the Cloud has on your licensing
On-premises software compliance is rather straightforward: what you have installed and/or in use needs to be licensed. When it comes to the cloud, the story becomes a bit more complex. Companies need to look at the migration paths from all angles. Considering the licensing and commercial perspective, a lot of questions will arise. Is the existing licensing metric going to change? What would happen to all the third-party interfaces? How do I make sure that all the functionalities and modules that I am using today on-premises are also covered in the associated cloud services? How do I make sure that I stay compliant during the migration from on-premises to the cloud? These are just a few questions that our customers asked. To some, the answer is simple. To most, we need to look at the specific situation of every company and assess how such a change can impact the business.
Before taking any kind of decision, you need to find all the answers and determine if migrating to the cloud is the right choice for you. For example, are you using industry specific SAP engines? Then you need to understand if they are ready for S/4HANA. Are you considering migrating your Oracle software environment to AWS, Microsoft, or Google? Then you need to understand how the license counting of the Oracle software works on these different cloud providers platforms and what are the differences in pricing.
Apart from this, you also need to consider all the previous investments you’ve made in your software publishers, sometimes multi-million dollars spanning across one or two decades. How do you make sure that this investment isn’t lost when moving to a subscription-based model? Thinking about your future needs is crucial as well, as you want to ensure a guaranteed pricing for additional or new subscription services. Many customers are wondering how they can get a similar or fixed price upon renewal of the initial cloud services. All valid and important questions you need to ask yourself if you want to avoid financial surprises in the future.
Last but not least, have you thought about an “exit plan”? Even though the cloud services seem like the right choice, you might realize later that they are in fact not satisfactory. Negotiation with the software publisher shouldn’t only be around the best commercial deal, but also around terms and conditions, including a possible “termination at convenience” clause.