Pernod Ricard. Four million dollars saved on Oracle licensing assessment.

Pernod Ricard is one of the largest French wine and spirits groups, with roughly twenty thousand employees and operations in more than seventy countries. Its Oracle estate covers Database Enterprise Edition, Real Application Clusters and the Diagnostics Pack.

A group built through acquisition across seventy countries holds entitlement in places nobody has looked recently. That is where the recovery came from.

The assessment took four million dollars out of the position.

The customer profile

Twenty thousand employees across more than seventy countries, with production, distribution and commercial operations on an Oracle foundation.

Drinks groups grow by acquiring brands, and brands arrive with their own systems, their own contracts and their own licences. Integration usually addresses the systems long before it addresses the licensing.

The result is entitlement scattered across legal entities that no longer match the operating structure.

The opening position

Oracle priced the provisioned estate with options at the full processor count and support renewed on the accumulated history across entities.

Without a consolidated entitlement record, the group could not tell whether it was being asked to buy something it already owned somewhere else in the business.

The approach

Entitlement consolidation came first here, ahead of the technical count. Every agreement across every acquired entity, mapped to the entities that exist today.

That exercise recovered licences the group already held but had never centrally recorded, which changed the shape of the negotiation before it started.

We then recounted processors on the correct core factor basis, audited which options were genuinely in use, and reconciled support against live capacity.

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

Pernod Ricard reduced its Oracle position by four million dollars across the contracted term.

• Entitlement. Consolidated across acquired entities and mapped to the current structure.
• Options. Reconciled to genuine use rather than to standard build defaults.
• Processor count. Rebuilt consistently across countries on the correct core basis.
• Support. Aligned to live capacity rather than accumulated purchase history.
• Governance. A single entitlement record maintained centrally from here.

For any group that grows by acquisition, the entitlement record is the artefact that decides renewals. Build it before you need it, because you cannot claim what you cannot find.

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.