The grant type was wrong more often than the quantity, and a commercial service delivered on internal use licenses has no hosting rights anywhere in the contract set

One registration form defines the entire scope of the grant. Nobody prices it, and it decides more than the quantity on the order ever will.

Prepared by Redress Compliance · August 19, 2026 · Oracle hosting and grant type engagements. 20 to 30 engagements reviewed, 2024 to 2025.

Using Oracle programs to deliver your own proprietary application to third party end users, from your own environment, as a service those users access remotely. That is the whole grant, and every word carries weight.

Four load bearing conditions

• Your application: the intellectual property has to be yours.
• Your environment: your data centre, colocation space or cloud tenancy, not an installation at the end user site.
• Their access, not their license: end users consume your service and gain no rights to the programs underneath.
• Commercially available: written for a service offered to a market, not a single dedicated environment run for one client.

Break one condition and you are outside the grant

These are not policy statements to argue around later. They are the definition of what was bought, and the definitions sit in the licensing definitions and rules.

More than most people expect, which is why the registration form matters more than the price does.

• No installation at the end user site: once software lands on customer infrastructure you are distributing rather than hosting.
• No resale or assignment: you cannot transfer, sublicense or bundle the license to the end user.
• No internal business operations: your own finance, people and reporting systems still need full use licenses.
• No unregistered applications: a second product line, a spin out or an acquired platform is not covered by a form describing the first one.

The single tenant workaround does not hold

Dedicated environments run for one named customer sit uncomfortably against a grant written for a commercially available service. That is the argument nobody wins twice. The master terms sit at the contracts library.

Across roughly 20 to 30 Oracle engagements involving hosted or embedded delivery that Fredrik Filipsson reviewed between 2024 and 2025, the grant type was wrong more often than the quantity. Four patterns recur.

• Companies delivering a commercial service on full use licenses bought for internal business operations, with no hosting rights in the contract set.
• Grants held against an application description written years earlier that no longer matched the product being sold.
• Teams paying for the hosting grant where the workload was their own business, and full use would have been correct and cheaper.
• Certifications where hosted deployments were excluded late, after being counted in the business case.

It fixes the grant to a written description of your product, and the vendor will hold you to that description. Depending on contract vintage the artifact carries different names, and it typically captures the application name, the architecture, the programs used and the intended end customers.

Two rules that keep it usable

• Describe the product, not the release: a description tied to a specific version or module set needs renegotiating the first time the roadmap moves.
• Keep it current: update the form when the product changes materially rather than hoping nobody reads it.

The mismatch is the standard audit finding

The distance between the registered description and the delivered service is what gets found. Treat the form as a scoping document rather than paperwork, and the finding never arises.

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By who holds the license, where the software runs, and who is allowed to touch it. There are four practical answers to how the technology reaches a third party, and picking the wrong one is expensive in both directions.

The neighbouring grants are worked through separately

The partner sold variant sits in the application specific full use guide and the vendor held variant in the embedded license guide. The full catalog of grant types sits in the license types reference.

The underlying program still has its own metric

Whichever grant carries the deployment, the database itself is licensed on the terms in the database licensing guide, and the edition limits that catch smaller hosting estates sit in the standard edition reference. The published rates behind every grant are on the technology price list.

Where the estate sits under an unlimited agreement, hosted deployments are the ones most often excluded late. The mechanics are in the unlimited agreement reference and the timing question in the decision framework.

The common advice is to negotiate the quantity and treat the grant type as paperwork. We disagree.

The form outranks the quantity

In the engagements reviewed the grant type was wrong more often than the quantity was, and a wrong grant is not fixable with a discount. It is fixable only by buying the right thing.

The buyer side move is to establish the grant type first, register the product honestly and keep the description current, then discuss quantity. Support runs at 22 percent annually whichever grant you hold, so the grant decides the base the percentage applies to.

The virtualization position sits in the virtualization guide, with the core factor mechanics in the core factor table.

Two findings, and they point in opposite directions from the same root cause.

Neither is a pricing question. Both are settled on paper before a quantity is ever discussed.

What does the hosting grant permit?

Using Oracle programs to deliver your own proprietary application to third party end users, from your own environment, as a service those users access remotely.

What are the load bearing conditions?

The application is yours, it runs in your environment, end users access your service rather than the programs, and the service is commercially available to a market.

Can software be installed at the customer site?

No. The moment it lands on customer infrastructure you are distributing rather than hosting, which needs an application specific or embedded arrangement instead.

Does it cover internal systems?

No. The grant covers the hosted service only. Your own finance, people and reporting systems still need full use licenses of their own.

Are all your products covered?

Only the registered one. A second product line, a spin out or an acquired platform is not covered by a form describing the first application.

What does the registration form do?

It fixes the grant to a written description of your product, capturing the application name, the architecture, the programs used and the intended end customers.

What is the standard audit finding?

The mismatch between the registered description and the service actually delivered, usually because the form was written years earlier and never updated.

Can a single tenant environment use it?

Uncomfortably. A dedicated environment run for one named customer sits against a grant written for a commercially available service, and that argument is not won twice.

Does the grant change the support rate?

No. Support runs at 22 percent annually whichever grant you hold, so the grant decides the base the percentage is charged against rather than the percentage itself.

What should be settled first?

The grant type. It was wrong more often than the quantity, and a wrong grant cannot be fixed with a discount, only by buying the right thing.