Full narration of the briefing. Click a section heading to jump the player to that moment.
There is no list price for a ULA. Every one is priced individually, based on what Oracle thinks your estate will become and what they believe you will pay. That means there is no published number to check yourself against, and it is why so many organisations sign without knowing whether the figure in front of them is reasonable. I am Tom, Claire is with me, and this session is how to benchmark a proposal anyway, using the only reference points that actually exist: your own deployment forecast and the price of buying the licences outright.
The first test converts the deal into a number you can actually compare. Take the fee, add support across the term, and divide by the deployment you honestly expect to certify at the end. That gives you an effective price per processor or per user. Now compare that against what those same licences would cost as a straightforward perpetual purchase at the discount you would realistically negotiate.
If the ULA number is meaningfully lower, the deal is doing its job. If it is close, you are paying a premium for flexibility, and flexibility should be worth something specific rather than something vague.
That calculation rests entirely on one number: how much you will actually deploy. And that number usually comes from the proposal rather than from you, which is the wrong way round. Oracle's model assumes the migration lands, the new platform gets adopted, the acquisition integrates, the growth arrives. Your real curve is flatter, because projects slip.
So before benchmarking anything, write your own deployment forecast, with named projects and dates, and be conservative. If the deal only works at the optimistic number, it is not a good deal. It is a bet, and you are the one carrying it.
Watch for the shape of an oversized proposal, because it has a signature. It includes products you have no plan to use, on the argument that they are effectively free inside the unlimited grant. They are not free. Every product in the list contributes to the price, and at certification you will only certify what you actually deployed, so an unused product converts to nothing while having cost you something.
The same applies to entities added speculatively and territories included just in case. Scope is not a free option. Price each addition and remove anything without a real deployment plan behind it.
So ask four questions, directly, and write the answers down. One: what deployment volume is this fee based on, product by product? Two: what happens to the price if we remove the products with no deployment plan? Three: how will the certification count be measured, specifically, including virtualisation and cloud?
Four: what is the support uplift cap? A well constructed proposal survives all four comfortably. A proposal sized for revenue rather than your growth gets vague on the first and defensive on the third, and that reaction tells you what the paperwork will not.
If you are benchmarking a renewal rather than a first ULA, you have an advantage a new customer never has: three years of your own data. You know what you deployed against what was forecast, and that history is the strongest possible argument about the next term's sizing. Worth knowing too, in our experience, renewal quotes move on average twenty to forty percent from the opening position. So treat the first number as an opening position rather than a price, because that is what it is, and the evidence that moves it is the deployment record you already own.
The move from this briefing: build your own deployment forecast and your own effective unit price before you look at the proposal again. Two pages, conservative, with named projects. That is your benchmark, and it is the only one that exists, because there is no published price to check against. Next session: the decision itself, certify, renew or exit, and how to work out which door you are actually standing in front of.
See you there.
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