How to reduce your Oracle Costs

Businesses up and down the country relying on Oracle technology to deliver and underpin key business applications all have one thing in common; they chose Oracle because it was the best solution to address their requirements. That said, as the cost of supporting Oracle continues to increase our customers are looking at ways in which to save money on their bottom line regardless of how valuable these Oracle assets are to the business. Explorer has a proven track record of being able to reduce costs AND to avoid future expenditure. Let me explain how:

License Advisory Services

Explorer performs license advisory services to organisations that want to identify shelf-ware and protect their business against non-compliance. These services are provided free of charge as we feel that by providing a free service proves that we have your best interests at heart and our “value” will be proven that you’ll want to work with us again at some point in the future.

Performing a thorough assessment of your Oracle assets will enable us to present you with options to reduce support costs, remove products from support if they are not used and optimise the deployment of in-use licenses across your infrastructure to give you the perfect mix of value, performance and availability.

The example below is a real customer of Explorer but for obvious reasons doesn’t want to be named! After spending some time on site with a senior technical consultant we identified the risk of non-compliance due to Oracle software across multiple Vmware hosts and shared storage. The result was to re-architect their Oracle workloads on dedicated infrastructure saving the customer over £1m in cost avoidance.

Another customer, for whom we provided our License Advisory Services to, did not have any compliance concerns but did have a significant amount of shelf-ware with Databases over-licensed causing the company to over-pay in Oracle support. Explorer advised on how this support cost could be better deployed in the Cloud and the result was a yearly saving of nearly £200,000!

Converting your Oracle support into Cloud costs is a really interesting opportunity for organisations looking at Public Cloud deployments. There is some nervousness from Oracle about promoting this as it impacts certain departments and how they recognise revenue so don’t expect your Oracle Account Manager to promote this but it IS an option available to you.

Oracle Engineered Systems is another route to consider to reduce Oracle costs and avoid further cost outlay; especially you’re interested in reducing “soft” costs like power, cooling, floor space, engineering time and ongoing operational costs;

Oracle Database Appliance – A family of converged infrastructure appliances designed to run Oracle Database workloads. The X6-2 High Availability model is designed to run clustered Databases using RAC, which is sometimes a design architecture fraught with complexity at the networking and storage layers to build correctly. Using shared commodity infrastructure can take weeks, literally, to build, trash, build, trash, build, tweak, test and deploy into production. The benefit of the ODA HA is that you’re up and running within 24 hours – end of story. Whilst the cost of acquiring the infrastructure might be 20-30% more expensive compared to comparable hardware you’ll save in consultancy and build time using ODA. Combine these savings with the fact that you only need to license the cores you need means that you get a system that can scale as your business grows and you’re only licensing what you need – another example of cost avoidance and cost savings in one appliance.

Private Cloud Appliance – The PCA is another Engineered System (Read Converged Infrastructure) but designed to run a mix of applications, OS and Database types and general purpose workloads. By using Oracle virtualisation to segregate environments businesses no longer have to invest in Vmware for software automation and orchestration. By removing these Vmware costs customers can save hundreds of thousands of pounds per year, and like Oracle, Vmware costs are only going one way!  The PCA is pre-configured with Servers, Storage, Networking and Virtualisation so deployment times are significantly reduced compared to building your own “Private Cloud” on premise.

There are many more examples of how Engineered Systems can reduce costs; including Big Data Appliance and Exadata so if you’re interested in learning more why not request a workshop?

If you would like to look at options on how to reduce your Oracle costs contact myself or one of the License Advisory consultants.

Author: Jon Lingard

Job Title: Practice Director

Bio: Jon is a member of the Oracle sales team and works with customers from start-ups, SMEs to large corporations to gain maximum value from their investment in Oracle technology. Jon works with the technical and development teams to shape solutions based on customer demands and develops long lasting customer relationships based on his open and trustworthy approach.