Kazakhstan Minerals Group. Oracle licensing assessment delivers material saving.

A Kazakhstan minerals group with roughly five thousand employees across Kazakhstan and Central Asia runs Oracle Database Enterprise Edition with Real Application Clusters and the Diagnostics Pack.

Mining estates have a particular licensing shape. Capacity is provisioned for peak processing loads and for the isolation of remote sites, and Oracle licenses provisioned capacity rather than average use.

The assessment optimised the position by matching the licence to the workload that actually runs.

The customer profile

Around five thousand employees across Kazakhstan and Central Asia, running extraction, processing and logistics operations at sites that are geographically remote from each other and from any central data centre.

That remoteness drives architecture. Sites need local resilience because connectivity cannot be assumed, which means capacity is duplicated in places where a better connected business would centralise.

Duplicated capacity is duplicated licensing, and it is worth being deliberate about which sites genuinely require it.

The opening position

Oracle's position priced every provisioned processor across every site, with options carried at the same count and support renewed on everything.

Provisioning had been set at build out for expected peak processing load. Nobody had revisited whether actual load had ever approached that ceiling.

The approach

We measured real workload against provisioned capacity, site by site, over a full operating cycle rather than a sample month.

Mining loads are cyclical, so a single month tells you very little. A full cycle shows where the genuine peak sits and how far provisioning exceeds it.

We then audited which sites genuinely required Real Application Clusters for resilience and which had it because it was applied as a standard build, and reconciled the Diagnostics Pack against actual use.

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 where the group spans jurisdictions.
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

• Position optimised. Licensed against measured workload rather than build out provisioning.
• Site resilience. Real Application Clusters matched to the sites that genuinely require local high availability.
• Options. Diagnostics Pack reconciled to real use.
• Processor count. Rebuilt on the correct core factor basis across the estate.
• Support. Aligned to capacity that is actually live.

Where operations are cyclical, measuring over a full cycle rather than a convenient month is the difference between a defensible position and a guess.

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.