Singapore Telco. Four million dollars saved on Oracle licensing.

A Singapore based telco operator with roughly five thousand employees across South East Asia runs Oracle Database Enterprise Edition with Real Application Clusters and the Diagnostics Pack.

Telco estates carry genuinely demanding availability requirements on the network and billing side, and considerably softer ones everywhere else. The licensing rarely reflects that difference.

The assessment took four million dollars out of the position.

The customer profile

Around five thousand employees across South East Asian operations, running billing, provisioning, customer management and network support systems.

Billing is the system that cannot fail, and it is also the system whose capacity is hardest to reduce. Everything around it is more negotiable than it looks.

Operating across several South East Asian markets adds entity and territory questions to the licensing picture.

The opening position

Oracle priced the provisioned estate with options carried at the full processor count and support renewed across everything.

The billing tier justified its cost. The rest of the estate had inherited the same build and therefore the same options, without the same requirement.

The approach

We separated the estate by genuine availability and performance requirement, starting from the billing and provisioning tier and working outward.

Clustering was then matched to the systems that actually require it, rather than applied uniformly, and the Diagnostics Pack was reconciled instance by instance.

We recounted processors on the correct core factor basis and checked entity and territory scope across the South East Asian markets.

The eleven moves

1. Recount processors on the correct core basis. Physical cores multiplied by the core factor, per server, rounded up.
2. Audit enabled options instance by instance. Especially the Diagnostics and Tuning packs.
3. Separate options in use from options merely enabled. The two are rarely the same set.
4. Match Real Application Clusters to the tier that needs it. Not to the whole estate.
5. Reconcile support against live capacity. Decommissioned hardware should not carry maintenance.
6. Test Enterprise Edition against Standard Edition 2. Where the socket and feature limits allow it.
7. Compare processor licensing against Named User Plus. Applying the minimums honestly.
8. Check entity and territory scope. Especially in groups spanning many countries.
9. Negotiate the discount across the whole stack. Licence, options and support together.
10. Fix price protection before you need it. Support compounds for the life of the estate.
11. Re measure quarterly. Provisioning drifts faster than annual reviews can track.

The commercial outcome

The operator reduced its Oracle position by four million dollars across the contracted term.

• Availability tiers. Billing and provisioning separated from the systems that do not carry the same requirement.
• Real Application Clusters. Matched to the tier that genuinely needs it.
• Diagnostics Pack. Reconciled to real use.
• Processor count. Rebuilt on the correct core factor basis.
• Entity scope. Checked across the South East Asian markets.

The billing tier is rarely where the saving is. It is everywhere that quietly inherited the billing tier's build.

How we engage

• Oracle scoping. A six week engagement that recounts processors on the correct core basis, audits enabled options instance by instance, and aligns support to live capacity. Oracle services practice.
• Oracle negotiation. We run the commercial conversation across the licence, the options and the support line. Oracle contract negotiation service.
• Oracle audit defense. Position and evidence if Oracle opens a review. Oracle audit services.
• Vendor Shield. Always on cover across Oracle and the wider software estate. Vendor Shield.
• Run the numbers. The software spend assessment sizes your Oracle position against what is actually deployed.