Full narration of the briefing. Click a section heading to jump the player to that moment.
A ULA has two prices, and organisations negotiate hard on the first one and barely look at the second. The first is the licence fee: one number, paid at the front, for the unlimited deployment right across the term. The second is support, and support is where the money actually lives, because it does not end when the term does. It continues for as long as you hold the certified licences, which is potentially forever.
I am Daniel, Claire has the arithmetic, and this session is both numbers, honestly, including the one nobody models.
Oracle support runs at twenty two percent of the licence value, annually. On top of that sits an annual uplift, and Oracle's default position is eight percent a year. Notice what that combination does. Twenty two percent is already a substantial recurring cost, and eight percent compounding on top means the support line roughly doubles every nine years even if you never buy another thing.
The median uplift customers actually pay is closer to six percent, which tells you two useful things: the eight is negotiable, and most organisations never test it, because support renewals arrive as an invoice rather than as a negotiation.
Let me make that concrete, because percentages hide the scale. Take a two million dollar annual support stream. At Oracle's preferred eight percent uplift, by year five you are paying two point nine four million. Cap it at three percent and year five is two point three two million.
Same support, same estate, same product. The difference is six hundred thousand dollars a year, purely from a clause. And that gap keeps widening every year after five, because compounding does not stop. If you take one commercial point from this session, take this one: the uplift cap is worth more than the discount on the fee.
Now connect that to the ULA itself, because this is the mechanism people miss. At certification, your deployment converts into a large perpetual licence position, and support is calculated against licence value. So the more you certify, the larger the base your twenty two percent applies to, forever. That is genuinely good for you on the licence side, because you got those licences without buying them individually.
It is also why Oracle is comfortable selling unlimited deployment: the annuity attached to the certified position is the return. Both things are true at once, and understanding that is what lets you negotiate the right parts.
So what do you actually push on? Three things, in this order. The uplift cap, because as we just saw it outweighs everything else across a long horizon. Aim for three to four percent in writing rather than accepting the default.
The support base itself, because how the certified position is valued for support purposes is a contractual question, not a law of physics. And the term length, because a longer ULA is worth real money to Oracle's forecast and should buy you something specific in return. Notice that only one of those three is the headline fee, and it is the one most negotiations spend all their time on.
Then run the comparison honestly, over the full life rather than the term. Model two paths. One: the ULA fee, plus support across the term, plus support on the certified position for the years afterwards. Two: buying perpetual licences for what you will realistically deploy, at your negotiated discount, plus support on that smaller base.
The second path has a smaller support base forever, which matters enormously in years six through ten. A ULA wins that comparison when deployment growth is genuinely large. When growth is modest, the arithmetic turns, and it turns in a place most business cases never look.
The move from this briefing: build a ten year support projection, not a three year one. Your current support line, uplifted at eight percent, and the same line uplifted at three. The gap between those two curves is what an uplift cap is worth to your organisation in real money, and it is usually the single largest negotiable number in the whole ULA conversation. Next session: how to benchmark a ULA proposal before you sign it, so you know whether the fee itself is defensible.
See you there.
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