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 engaged SoftwareOne to help with the renewal process. During the engagement, 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 program 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 licensing 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 engaged 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 analyze and explain its current deployments, associated risks, and opportunities of improvement. SoftwareOne performed annual compliance baselines to determine its license entitlements and measure actual usage. It was discovered that there were considerable compliance risks due to the deployment of Oracle Programs on VMware at an outsourcing company. Although the customer had a ULA for which it could make use of Oracle’s licensing rules around deployments on VMware in its favor, the customer also needed to obtain additional Oracle licenses for GoldenGate programs.

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

For other programs 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.