Oracle BYOL vs License Included on OCI and Exadata Cloud@Customer
When moving Oracle databases to the cloud, IT leaders choose between Bring Your License (BYOL) and License Included models. This guide focuses exclusively on the cost considerations of these models on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Exadata Cloud@Customer.
We will compare licensing cost structures, total cost of ownership (TCO) over 1, 3, and 5 years, cost differences by workload type, core count factors and license portability, scenarios favoring each model, and how each affects budgeting and predictability.
Licensing Cost Structures: BYOL vs License Included
License Included means you pay for Oracle database usage in the cloud with the software license bundled in. You simply pay a higher hourly/monthly rate for the cloud service; all required Oracle Database licenses (and support) are included in that price.
There is no separate on-premise license needed, which is ideal if you don’t already own Oracle licenses. For example, Exadata Cloud@Customer’s license-included pricing includes Oracle Database Enterprise Edition and all options/packs in the subscriptionoracle.com.
BYOL (Bring Your Own License) means you apply your existing Oracle database licenses to the cloud deployment. The cloud service cost is reduced to reflect that you are providing the license. You continue paying separate annual support for your Oracle licenses.
This model leverages licenses you’ve already purchased (or plan to purchase) to lower cloud subscription fees. Oracle notes that BYOL “enables customers to use existing licenses and lower subscription costs”.
However, you must ensure you use only the database edition and options your licenses entitle you to (no usage of features you haven’t licensed).
Key differences in cost components:
- Upfront License Cost: BYOL requires you to have purchased Oracle licenses (a capital expense or sunk cost if already owned). For instance, an Oracle Database Enterprise Edition license lists at about $47,500 per processor (covering two OCI OCPUs), with actual prices varying by discounts. License Included requires no upfront license purchase; you “rent” the license via the higher cloud fee.
- Annual Support Fees: With BYOL, you pay Oracle support on your licenses each year (typically 22% of the license price). Support for a $47.5k EE license is around $10,450 per year. In License Included, support is built into the cloud rate – you don’t pay it separately.
- Cloud Service Rate: Oracle charges a lower rate for BYOL deployments and a higher rate for License Included. BYOL cloud unit pricing can be 80–90% lower than the license-included price for the same service. You essentially pay for compute/storage and Oracle’s infrastructure, not the software license. For example, on OCI’s Database services, a License-Included Enterprise Edition database costs about $0.4301 per OCPU/hour, whereas BYOL for the same service costs about $0.1935 per OCPU/hour. That is a ~55% discount with BYOL in that case. In Autonomous Database scenarios, Oracle notes that BYOL can lower the database compute costs by around 76%. Similarly, on Exadata Cloud@Customer, the Oracle Database software portion costs about $0.336 per CPU hour with License Included vs $0.0807 with BYOL (list prices) – BYOL is roughly one-quarter the cost.
- Included Features: License Included pricing includes all database options and packs (especially on Oracle cloud services where editions are packaged as “Enterprise High Performance”, “Extreme Performance”, etc.). BYOL lets you use only the features/options for which you have licenses. If you need advanced features (like RAC, Multitenant, etc.) and don’t own them, using them under BYOL isn’t allowed without purchasing those licenses. The cost implication: License Included’s higher price covers those options for flexibility, whereas BYOL might require additional license purchases if those features are needed.
- Support Rewards: Oracle’s Support Rewards program can offset support costs for BYOL customers. For every $1 spent on OCI services, you accrue $0.25 (25%) in rewards (or $0.33 for ULA customers) that can be used to pay down your on-premise support bills. This effectively reduces the net cost of support for BYOL when you use OCI heavily – a unique cost benefit of Oracle Cloud to consider in the BYOL model.
In summary, License Included = higher cloud fees, no separate license cost, and BYOL = lower cloud fees, but with ongoing license/support costs outside the cloud bill. Next, we’ll see how this plays out over the multi-year total cost.
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) over 1, 3, and 5 Years
When evaluating BYOL vs License Included, it’s critical to analyze TCO over several years, not just monthly costs. Below is a comparison for an example deployment on OCI:
Example Scenario: A production database requiring 4 OCPUs (e.g., 2 physical processor licenses) running 24×7. We compare costs if using BYOL versus License Included. Assumptions: Oracle Database Enterprise Edition licenses at $47,500 per processor, 22%/year support, and OCI list prices of ~$0.4301/OCPU-hour for license-included EE and ~$0.1935/OCPU-hour for BYOL. Discounts are not included (actual costs may be lower with enterprise discounting).
Table 1: 1-Year, 3-Year, 5-Year Cost Comparison – BYOL vs License Included
Notes: These are illustrative and assume list pricing with no discounts. In practice, a company might get significant discounts on license purchases (reducing BYOL upfront cost) or commit to cloud usage for lower rates.
The BYOL model’s upfront license cost is amortized over time – the longer you use it, the more the initial license investment is spread out. In this example, even at 5 years, the license-included model appears cheaper if we strictly use list prices (because Oracle’s cloud rate in this case is relatively low and the license cost was high).
However, with a typical enterprise discount (say 50% off licenses), the BYOL TCO would drop substantially – narrowing the gap or making BYOL cheaper over ~5 years or more. Always do the math with your actual pricing: BYOL TCO = license cost + (annual support * years) + (cloud BYOL rate * usage * years); License Included TCO = cloud full rate * usage * years.
It’s worth noting that Oracle’s pricing structure encourages BYOL mainly when you already own licenses or have a long-term use horizon. If you already have the licenses (sunk cost), the Year 1 BYOL cost in the above scenario would exclude that $95k purchase, making BYOL dramatically cheaper.
In that case, the BYOL cost would be support + cloud usage (~$27.7k/year in our example) versus a $15k/year license-included – a closer comparison where the breakeven might occur in a few more years. If you’re starting from scratch (no existing licenses), License Included often has a lower short-term TCO (especially in the 1–3 year range), whereas BYOL might pay off in the long run or if you secure big license discounts.
Workload Type Impact on Costs (Dev/Test vs. Production)
The cost-effectiveness of BYOL vs License Included can shift depending on the workload type and usage patterns:
- Steady 24/7 Production Workloads: These are typically always-on and utilize resources continuously. BYOL is attractive here if you already own licenses because you can keep your servers busy and get maximum value from the licenses. Since the usage is consistent, the lower BYOL cloud rate yields significant savings over timeoracle.com. If licenses are in place (or a long-lived project justifies buying them), BYOL often lowers long-term TCO for steady workloads. However, if you don’t own licenses for a brand new production system, you’d need a large upfront expenditure to purchase them – so you must weigh that against simply paying as you go. In a long-running production scenario (e.g., a mission-critical database you expect to run for many years), buying licenses once and paying the reduced BYOL cloud fee can be more cost-effective after a certain point. On the other hand, some organizations with no existing licenses might opt for license inclusion even in production to avoid capital expenditure, especially if the project timeline or future scale is uncertain.
- Development/Test Environments: These tend to have intermittent or part-time usage. For example, a dev/test database might run only during business hours or be spun up only for specific testing cycles. In such cases, the pay-as-you-go flexibility of License Included can be very cost-efficient. You can turn off or scale down the environment when not in use and aren’t paying for an underutilized license. With BYOL, you’d have to own a license for that environment (or allocate part of a license), and you’d be paying support year-round even if the environment is idle most of the time. BYOL may not make sense for short-term or spiky dev/test needs unless you have spare license capacity. The included license lets you incur costs only when the dev/test environment runs. For instance, a test environment used for one month would incur only that month’s higher cloud fee (no ongoing commitment). This can be much cheaper than buying a perpetual license just to use the software briefly.
- Example: Suppose a QA environment needs 4 OCPUs for 2 months a year. Under License Included at $0.4301/OCPU-hour, running 4 OCPUs for 2 months (1460 hours) costs about $2,510finops.org. With BYOL, the cloud cost would be lower ($1,130 for 1460 hours at $0.1935/OCPU-hour)finops.org, but you would need to own two processor licenses ($95k worth) plus pay support (~$10k/year) regardless. For transient use, renting the license for $2.5k is far more economical than BYOL (unless those licenses were already idle in your pool).
- For long-running dev/test systems that are effectively always on (especially if they mirror prod in scale), BYOL could still be viable. However, many companies try to optimize dev/test costs by scheduling downtime or using smaller instances. License Included provides maximum flexibility to scale these costs to zero when the systems are off.
- Bursty or Seasonal Workloads: If your workload demand fluctuates (e.g., end-of-quarter reporting, holiday traffic spikes), License Included offers cost agility. You can scale up instances (adding more OCPUs) beyond your owned-license count by temporarily switching those extra instances to license-included mode. In OCI, it’s possible to mix and switch models as needed – e.g., run base capacity on BYOL and burst on license-included. Oracle even allows switching a database deployment from BYOL to License Included (and vice versa) without downtime. This means you could use BYOL during normal operations. If you suddenly need more CPUs than you have licenses for, you can temporarily convert to License Included, scale up, pay the higher rate for that period, then scale back down and switch back to BYOL. This hybrid approach ensures you don’t over-buy licenses for rare peaks. The cost implication is that you pay a premium only during bursts rather than maintaining extra licenses year-round.
- Workloads with Uncertain Lifespan: If a project or application might be short-lived or you’re trialing a new workload, License Included avoids locking in a license investment. You pay purely for what you use. BYOL only makes sense if you can repurpose existing licenses or are fairly sure the workload will persist (to justify the license purchase).
In summary, stable, high-utilization environments favor BYOL (especially if licenses are in hand). Meanwhile, intermittent, variable, or short-term environments often favor License Included due to its flexibility and avoidance of sunk costs. Many enterprises use a combination, e.g. BYOL for prod, license-included for agile test/dev and overflow capacity.
Core Factors, Minimums, and License Portability Considerations
Oracle’s licensing policies impose some technical factors and minimums that affect cost calculations in BYOL scenarios:
- Core Factors and OCPU Licensing: On-premises Oracle licenses are based on physical processor cores (with a core factor depending on CPU type). In OCI and Exadata Cloud, Oracle simplifies this via OCPUs/ECPUs. Generally, 1 Oracle Processor license covers 2 OCPUs (vCPUs) in OCI for Enterprise Editionfinops.org. This essentially reflects the common core factor of 0.5 for Intel cores. For example, if you have 4 OCPUs allocated in OCI, you need 2 processor licenses for Enterprise Edition. Oracle’s service descriptions detail conversion ratios (e.g., 1 Processor license = 2 OCPUs for BYOL)finops.org. For Named User Plus (NUP) licenses, you must also meet user minimums (usually 25 NUP per processor for Enterprise Edition)redresscompliance.com, but in cloud deployments, many use processor metrics for simplicity. Minimum OCPU Commit: In some services (especially Exadata Cloud@Customer), there may be a minimum number of OCPUs to activate. For instance, on Exadata Cloud@Customer Gen2, a VM cluster requires at least 8 OCPUs (ECPUs) to be enabled, and there’s a minimum 48-hour charge for any DB instance you bring online. This means even if you only need 2 OCPUs for a small DB, the platform might bill for eight if that’s the minimum – affecting cost. With BYOL, you’d need licenses for that minimum, even if your workload is small. This is an important consideration: very small workloads might not size down as much on Exadata Cloud@Customer due to minimums, potentially favoring license-included if you don’t want to buy licenses for capacity you won’t fully use.
- License Portability and Transition Periods: Oracle allows a grace period for moving licenses to the cloud. BYOL licenses cannot be used simultaneously on-premises and in the cloud beyond a short overlap. However, Oracle’s policy gives you up to 100 days of concurrent use on-prem and OCI for transitionfinops.org. (This is to facilitate migration – you can run the new cloud instance on BYOL while still running on-premises for up to 100 days without needing duplicate licenses, after which the on-prem usage must be discontinued or separately licensed.) For Exadata Cloud@Customer, Oracle often allows an extended overlap (some sources indicate up to ~180 days in certain programs) for transitioning workloads since it’s an on-premises cloud model. This portability means you can migrate to BYOL in the cloud without immediate cost spikes, as long as you complete the move in the allowed window. After migration, the license is considered “deployed” in the cloud and can’t be used on-prem. From a cost perspective, this avoids buying new licenses for the cloud just to cover a migration period.
- License Mobility between Cloud Models: Oracle BYOL is not limited to Oracle’s cloud – you can also bring licenses to AWS, Azure, etc., but the conversion rules differ. On OCI and Cloud@Customer, Oracle’s cloud, the licenses are fully recognized at favorable ratios (as mentioned, 1 license per 2 OCPUs), and all Oracle database features you have licenses for are allowed. On other clouds, Oracle’s licensing rules still apply (e.g., Oracle counts vCPUs on AWS/Azure such that two vCPUs = 1 license in authorized cloud environments). There’s no direct cost difference on Oracle’s side (since those are not Oracle-managed services). Still, it’s worth noting because some IT leaders compare running Oracle on OCI vs AWS RDS, etc. (Those comparisons often find OCI BYOL pricing to be better optimized for Oracle licenses). In this guide, we focus on OCI/Exadata Cloud@Customer, where Oracle’s BYOL program is designed to give cost benefits to customers using Oracle Cloudnpifinancial.com. In short, license portability is easiest and most cost-effective within OCI due to the BYOL program and support rewards.
- BYOL Eligibility and Support: Only active, supported licenses qualify for BYOLfinops.org. Lapsed support or certain types of restricted licenses (like Oracle’s free developer licenses or embedded application licenses) cannot be used for BYOLfinops.org. Ensure your budget supports renewals since dropping support would forfeit your BYOL rights (and non-compliance can lead to audits/fees). This also means the support cost is a necessary part of BYOL TCO – though, as mentioned, Oracle Support Rewards can effectively discount it when you use OCI.
When BYOL is More Cost-Effective vs. When License Included is Better
Choosing between BYOL and License Included often comes down to your specific situation. Below are scenarios where each model shines in terms of cost:
Scenarios Favoring BYOL (Cost-Effective with BYOL)
- You already own sufficient Oracle licenses (with support): In this case, BYOL usually maximizes the value of those sunk costs. Your ongoing expense is support (which you’re likely paying anyway) and a much lower cloud rate. Existing workloads with consistent usage are ideal for BYOL – e.g., moving an on-prem Oracle database that runs 24/7 into OCI and applying your license. The cloud bill will drop dramatically (often ~50-80% lower unit cost)finops.org, directly reducing TCO since you’re not double-paying for Oracle licenses.
- Long project lifespan / Stable growth: If you anticipate running the database for many years at a steady capacity, investing in licenses can yield lower TCO over the long term (especially if you negotiate a good discount on the licenses upfront). Over 5+ years, the upfront license cost can be amortized, and BYOL will usually come out ahead in total cost versus paying the premium hourly rate indefinitely. The longer and larger the deployment, the more BYOL’s savings compound.
- Enterprise License Agreements in place: If your company has an Oracle ULA (Unlimited License Agreement) or a pool of excess licenses, BYOL is essentially “free” from a licensing cost perspective. The marginal cost of using another server is negligible since you’re covered by the ULA (though support fees continue). In such a scenario, a lower BYOL cloud rate means huge savings. (Additionally, under an Oracle ULA, using OCI can generate support rewards at 33%, offsetting support costs.) Many Oracle customers with ULAs or surplus licenses find BYOL the obvious choice financially – it delivers material cost savings by utilizing what they’ve already paid for.
- Need for full control of licenses: Some organizations prefer BYOL because it allows them to leverage existing investments and move workloads between on-prem and cloud. Cost-wise, if you might move workloads back on-prem or to another cloud, owning the license (BYOL) is better – a license-included subscription doesn’t give you a transferable asset. BYOL in OCI/Exadata Cloud@Customer thus provides cost predictability in that you have a perpetual license asset that can be used in different environments as needed (subject to compliance).
- Multiple environments reuse: If you have a license, you could use it for non-production when it’s not in production (though not concurrently). For example, some clients occasionally bring a prod database down and repurpose the license for a test environment (within the bounds of license terms). This is complex and not always practical, but owning the license at least gives the theoretical ability to allocate it as needed (whereas license-included is tied to that specific cloud usage only).
Scenarios Favoring License-Included (Cost-Effective with License-Included)
- No existing licenses / High upfront cost is a barrier: If you don’t already own Oracle database licenses, purchasing them outright (potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars for a multi-core deployment) may not be palatable or possible in your budget. In such cases, the OPEX model of License Included is far more accessible – you pay as you use, with no big upfront spend. This is especially true for smaller organizations or new workloads where the capital expenditure of licenses would blow the budget. The license-included model folds that cost into a monthly bill, which can often be tied to project budgets, passed through to clients, etc., more easily than a one-time purchase.
- Short-term or uncertain duration projects: For a project expected to last a year or two (or an indefinite but likely short timeline), buying perpetual licenses doesn’t make financial sense. The included license is akin to “renting” the license for as long as needed. For example, suppose you have a 6-month analytics project or a temporary environment. In that case, paying the higher hourly rate for 6 months will be far cheaper than purchasing licenses you might not use afterward. You avoid potentially being stuck with shelfware licenses.
- Highly variable or seasonal workloads: If your resource needs swing up and down, License Included provides cost flexibility. You can scale out when needed and only pay during those peaks. BYOL, in a pure sense, would require owning enough licenses to cover the peak, meaning you pay support on those licenses year-round, even if they are only fully used during peak season. With a license included, you can effectively pay a premium only on demand. Many businesses with seasonal spikes find it cheaper overall to use license-included during spikes than to maintain a larger pool of licenses. (Alternatively, as noted, one can mix models – base load on BYOL, overflow on License Included – to optimize cost. This agility is a big advantage of OCI since you can switch without downtime.)
- Development and testing agility: As discussed, spinning up many short-lived dev/test instances or CI/CD environments under License Included can be cost-efficient. You might start and stop dozens of VMs or autonomous databases in a month for testing – tracking license assignments for each under BYOL would be a headache (and you’d need enough licenses to cover concurrent ones). Instead, license-included lets teams self-service without worrying about license counts. The cost is directly tied to actual usage time, giving fine-grained cost control. For budgeting, each project can be charged for exactly what it used in the cloud, with no hidden license costs.
- Access to all features without buying options: If your workload may need advanced Oracle Database options (e.g., Partitioning, Advanced Security, In-Memory, RAC, etc.) and you do not own those licenses, the License Included service tiers (like “Extreme Performance”) include all those options by default. This could be cost-beneficial versus purchasing each of those option licenses (each of which can cost tens of thousands per processor). For example, instead of buying RAC, Multitenant, and In-Memory options on top of Enterprise Edition, one could use an Extreme Performance cloud service (license included) when those features are needed. License Included avoids large option license purchases if those needs are temporary or uncertain. In BYOL, you must either forego those features or invest in their licenses. So, license-included might be the cheaper route for feature-rich use cases that you haven’t already licensed on-prem.
- Simplified compliance and management: The Cost of a model isn’t just raw dollars – it’s also overhead. With License Included, you greatly reduce the risk of incurring unexpected licensing costs due to miscounted cores or unauthorized feature usage because Oracle is essentially taking care of the licensing. In contrast, BYOL requires vigilance to ensure you have enough licenses for the cloud deployment and are not accidentally using features you didn’t license (since the cloud won’t always technically prevent it). The cost of a potential license compliance issue or true-up can be huge – some organizations choose license-included to avoid that risk, especially in complex environments. So if predictability and risk avoidance have monetary value, license-included may be “cheaper” in the big picture.
In summary, BYOL is best when you have licenses and a steady, long-term need – it leverages existing investments and lowers ongoing cloud spending. License Included is best when you need flexibility, have a short or variable workload, or lack licenses – it trades higher hourly cost for zero upfront commitment and maximum agility. There is no one-size-fits-all answer; many enterprises use a combination to optimize costs.
Budgeting and Cost Predictability
The choice between BYOL and License Included also impacts how you plan and predict your IT budgets:
- CAPEX vs OPEX: BYOL often involves capital expenditure (CapEx) for license procurement (unless you own them). This means a large upfront cost must be budgeted in advance (or accounted as an asset). The benefit is that subsequent cloud costs are lower (OPEX for cloud infrastructure only). The license includes pure operational expense (OpEx), which you pay as part of your monthly cloud bill. Some organizations prefer OpEx for cloud projects to align with subscription-based spending and to avoid depreciating software assets. Budgeting-wise, if you have unused license capacity, BYOL lets you reuse that sunk CapEx; if not, License Included might align better with cloud-era financial models.
- Predictable Recurring Costs: With BYOL, you will have a fixed annual support cost that recurs yearly (typically rises ~4% annually if not negotiated). This is predictable and can be budgeted as a steady run-rate (it’s essentially your “subscription” for updates/support). Your cloud infrastructure costs will vary with usage but at a lower rate. In License Included, all costs are variable with usage – if you run more hours or add more OCPUs, your bill increases proportionally, if you shut down resources, it drops. Budgeting for BYOL might involve two lines: a fixed support contract and a variable cloud usage bill. Budgeting for License Included condenses everything into the cloud bill, but that bill can swing with usage. For organizations that do long-term planning, BYOL’s fixed support and known license scope can add some stability (you know you can use X cores for Y cost per year support, no matter what). License Included might require careful monitoring to avoid budget surprises if usage grows.
- Cost Predictability vs Flexibility: BYOL can be cost-predictable if you size your environment and licenses appropriately – you know your support fees, and if usage is steady, the cloud spend is somewhat steady too. However, suppose your capacity needs to grow unexpectedly beyond your license count. In that case, you face the unplanned expense of acquiring more licenses (CapEx) or switching to license-included (higher OpEx) for the overflow. The license included is very flexible – costs scale up or down according to your needs – but that can make forecasting tricky if your usage pattern is unpredictable. One month’s bill could be significantly higher if many extra workloads were run. To mitigate this, organizations sometimes purchase Oracle Universal Credits or commit to a certain cloud spend, which can also yield discounts. Committed spend on license-included services gives some predictability (you commit to pay $X over a year, for example). With BYOL, predictability comes from the fact that you’ve prepaid licenses and just have steady support fees.
- Impact on IT Finance: BYOL may shift expenses into different buckets. For example, support renewals might come from a software maintenance budget, while cloud usage comes from a cloud operations budget. License Included puts everything in the cloud ops budget. Depending on internal accounting, one model may be preferred. Some CFOs like the clarity of a service subscription (license included), while others are fine leveraging existing assets for lower variable costs (BYOL). It’s important to communicate the cost model to finance teams so they understand, for instance, that choosing BYOL means a large Year 1 expense (if buying licenses) and then a lower run-rate, whereas License Included is pay-as-you-go throughout.
- Multi-year Contracts and Discounts: Oracle often negotiates custom deals. You might get a discount on cloud subscription if you bring licenses (since Oracle knows you’ve invested in their tech already), or conversely, you might negotiate license-included cloud credits. Also, if you’re consolidating workloads on Exadata Cloud@Customer, Oracle might require a minimum term. In any case, try to model out costs over the contract term. BYOL’s advantage is that after an initial purchase, you are somewhat insulated from price increases in cloud service rates since you pay the lower BYOL rate, which Oracle tends to keep stable relative to support. License Included pricing could change (though generally stable, Oracle could adjust cloud prices or you might lose a discount after a term). Owning the license gives you the leverage to move off the cloud without losing the right to use the software, which can be a cost hedge.
- Example – Budgeting Scenario: Imagine planning for an upcoming year of database operations. With BYOL, you know you have 10 licenses in hand with support costing say $100k/year. This $100k is a fixed line item. You plan to run those licenses in OCI with an expected usage of N hours and maybe $50k in cloud infrastructure spend, so you budget ~$150k. If you end up using the cloud less, you still pay $100k support regardless (potential over-budget on a per-use basis), but you might underspend your cloud budget. With License Included, you might budget $200k for cloud usage for the year, covering all needed hours. If you use less, you save money (but might have budget left unspent); if you use more, you need to find additional funds or credits since there’s no fixed cap except your set guardrails. In short, BYOL trades some flexibility for more known fixed costs, whereas License Included is pure variable cost, which can be optimized but requires vigilance.
Conclusion and Key Takeaways
Choosing BYOL vs License Included on OCI or Exadata Cloud@Customer is a strategic decision that hinges on cost trade-offs:
- By leveraging existing licenses, BYOL offers significantly lower cloud rates (often 50–80% lower). It shines for long-term, steady workloads and when you have licenses in hand – driving down TCO over time. Budget for ongoing support costs and ensure compliance management. BYOL is most cost-effective when you fully utilize your licenses (e.g., in production 24/7) and have a multi-year horizon.
- License Included provides a “no-strings” subscription – higher hourly cost but zero upfront licensing cost and complete flexibility. It is cost-effective for short-term needs, variable workloads, and those without Oracle licenses. It simplifies budgeting to a single cloud bill and avoids the complexity of license management. You pay a premium for convenience and agility, which can save money if it prevents over-purchasing licenses or lets you shut down resources when not needed.
IT leaders should evaluate their inventory of licenses, workload patterns, and financial preferences. Often, a hybrid approach maximizes savings: use BYOL where you can (to exploit lower rates for constant loads) and use License Included for everything else (burst, test, new projects).
Also factor in Oracle’s programs like Support Rewards (which effectively discount support costs when using OCI) as part of the equation – these can tilt the math further in favor of using OCI with BYOL if you’re currently paying large support fees.
Perform a detailed TCO analysis of the project’s life, including license purchase, support, cloud costs, and potential discounts. The examples and tables in this guide illustrate the importance of the timeline: BYOL may look expensive in year 1 but can win out in later years, whereas License Included is “pay little now, keep paying more later.”
Align the model with your organization’s financial strategy (CapEx vs OpEx) and risk tolerance. By understanding these cost factors, you can confidently choose the model that delivers the best total cost of ownership for your Oracle databases in the cloud.
