Full narration of the briefing. Click a section heading to jump the player to that moment.
Five sessions of mechanics come down to one instruction for the room. Negotiate the metric, not the discount. The discount applies once, to one purchase, on one day. The metric applies every year, to every renewal, through every acquisition, for as long as you run the module.
So when you have one concession left to spend, spend it on the definition rather than the percentage. And ask the test question out loud on every line: if headcount doubles and usage does not, what happens to this line? If the answer is that it doubles, you are negotiating the wrong number, and no discount available to you will cover the difference.
That said, the discount still matters, for a reason most buyers never state. Support is calculated on the net licence fee, so the discount you win once sets the base you pay on for a decade. Two hundred users of Financials at sixty percent off is roughly three hundred and sixty eight thousand dollars of net licence, and about nine hundred and twenty seven thousand dollars of support across ten years at the three percent annual uplift most contracts permit. Seventy two percent of the ten year cost is the annuity, not the purchase.
Which cuts both ways, and this is the trap: a module you never deploy still pays its share of that stream, calculated on net licence, whether it runs or not.
Next, the timing lever, and it is the largest single number in this series. Buyers who found their genuine gaps and licensed them proactively landed forty to sixty percent below Oracle's opening audit list positions. Same software, same shortfall, completely different price, and the only variable is who started the conversation. Under audit you are negotiating against a deadline you did not set, from a list you did not build, with your own data used as the evidence.
Before an audit you are simply a customer buying something. So the four way reconciliation from session four is not a compliance chore. It is the cheapest commercial lever you have, and it expires the day the letter arrives.
Then handle the urgency, because you will be offered some. 2 is committed to at least 2037, so no technical deadline forces a conversion, a migration, or a metric change on anybody's timetable but yours. Understand the difference between the two events. A renewal continues your existing base, with your existing metrics and your legacy discounts intact.
A conversion is the one event that reopens all of it: it recalculates support on the replacement licences and typically strips the legacy discount out along the way. Any urgency attached to that conversation is commercial rather than technical, and it belongs to the party who benefits from it.
The support decision completes the picture, and it deserves an honest treatment rather than a slogan. EBS is mature, Oracle has moved the Premier Support date more than once, and third party support at roughly half the fee is a genuine option with genuine losses: no new patches, and no upgrade path. Weigh it against your actual patch and upgrade reality rather than against the theory of one. But do the shelf work first regardless of where you land, because terminating support on modules nobody uses is the version of this decision that carries no downside at all, and most estates have between two and four of them.
So, five moves to start this quarter. One, reconcile Application Users against login activity and deprovision the dormant thirty to forty percent before a renewal prices them again. Two, audit the restricted use boundary, every schema, feed and custom application on the EBS instances, because the breach is always ordinary work. Three, read every metric definition word for word and answer the five growth questions in writing before any new line signs.
Four, assign a named owner to every volume metric counter, because bands breach silently when nobody is watching the throughput. Five, price the support decision honestly, Oracle against third party, on your real patch and upgrade position. That is the series. If you want a second pair of eyes on any of it, Redress Compliance works buyer side only, and the first conversation costs nothing.
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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