Full narration of the briefing. Click a section heading to jump the player to that moment.
The Application User is the default EBS metric, and almost everyone misreads it in the same direction. It counts a named individual authorised to use a module. Not a login. Not an active session.
Authorisation. If someone holds a responsibility that reaches a module, they are licensable on that module whether they opened it this year or never opened it at all. And it counts per module, so one person authorised on General Ledger, Payables, Receivables and Fixed Assets is four licences, not one. That multiplication is where the number gets away from people, because nobody grants a responsibility while thinking about a price list.
Which is why the first place we look is the leaver list. Across the twenty five to thirty five EBS engagements behind this series, dormant Application Users averaged thirty to forty percent of the licensed total in estates without a recent review. Those are licences renewing at full rate for people who have left, changed role, or were provisioned for a project that ended two years ago. Nothing about that is exotic.
It is the ordinary residue of a decade of joiners and movers in a system where deprovisioning is nobody's job description. And it is the most controllable metric you own, because Application User grows only when a human being adds a person. Everything else in this series grows on you whether you act or not.
So do the work before the renewal, not after it. Buyers who reconciled their authorised list against actual login activity and deprovisioned the dormant accounts cut their Application User counts by twenty to thirty five percent. The sequence matters more than the effort. Reconcile first, deprovision second, renew third, because a renewal prices whatever the count says on the day.
Do it in the other order and you have just bought three more years of people who left in 2021. And keep the evidence. A dated extract of authorisations against logins, taken before you opened the commercial conversation, is worth more later than any argument you can construct under audit pressure.
Two clarifications that catch experienced teams. First, read only is not free. The standard definitions license authorisation to use, and there is no inquiry only carve out sitting in the contract waiting for you. The manager who only ever runs a report is a licensable user on that module.
Second, misclassification compounds quietly. One professional grade user sitting on a self service licence is a finding. Several hundred of them is a settlement, and in five of ten estates we reviewed the self service population had drifted into professional grade access, usually through a single added responsibility that nobody connected to a licence line.
Now the older estates, because this one is worth real money. Plenty of EBS contracts still carry Concurrent User licences, and concurrency licenses peak simultaneous use, not people. Picture an estate holding three hundred Concurrent User licences, carrying eight hundred and fifty named accounts, with a measured peak of a hundred and eighty. That estate is compliant, with a hundred and twenty seats of headroom.
But the standard audit script counts named accounts, so it reports eight hundred and fifty, and the finding, the pressure and the conversion offer are all manufactured from that single misread. The gap is a measurement error rather than a compliance gap, and it becomes a finding only if nobody in the room can prove the peak.
So build the proof before the letter arrives. Capture the EBS sign on audit at session level, sample it across at least a full quarter including period close, and file it with the method you used. A dated internal record beats any reconstruction produced under audit pressure, every time. And hold one principle when the conversion offer follows: your paper governs, not the current price list.
Oracle metric definitions are year versioned, and your entitlement is the sum of thirty years of orders, agreements and amendments, not whatever the latest quote says. A renewal continues that base. A conversion is the one event that reopens it, recalculates support on the replacement licences, and typically strips the legacy discount out.
Redress Compliance works on contingency: our fee is 25 percent of what we save you. Nothing saved, nothing paid. Independent, buyer side only, never vendor funded. Want Redress to contact you? Reach out and we respond the same day.
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