Full narration of the briefing. Click a section heading to jump the player to that moment.
Every ULA ends at the same place: a decision with three doors. Certify and take the perpetual position. Renew for another term. Or exit entirely, which in practice means certify and then move away from Oracle over time.
In 2026, roughly four out of five customers walk through the first door. That number is worth sitting with, because it means the default outcome that Oracle presents most persuasively, renewal, is the one that most organisations conclude is wrong for them. I am Tom, Daniel is with me, and this is how to work out which door is yours.
The test is one question, and everything else is detail. Will you deploy materially more Oracle in the next three years than you have deployed already? Not might. Not if the programme lands.
Will you, with named projects and dates. If the honest answer is yes, at scale, renewal can be right, because the unlimited grant is worth something to you. If the answer is no, or the growth is modest, renewal is a fee for a right you will not exercise, and certification banks the position you already built at no further licence cost. Most estates are stable, which is exactly why most customers certify.
So take the first door seriously, because it is stronger than it sounds. You certify what you deployed, that becomes a permanent perpetual entitlement, and you stop paying the ULA fee. You keep everything you built. You still pay support on the certified position, so this is not free, but you have converted an expiring right into a permanent asset.
It also restores options you did not have inside the term: you can consider third party support, you can consolidate, you can migrate workloads, you can shrink. None of those were realistic while the ULA fee was running.
Door two, renewal, has to earn its place against that, and the framing matters. Renewal is not continuity. It is a new purchase, of a new unlimited right, for a new fee, and it should be justified on the growth ahead rather than on the deal behind. Watch for the two arguments used to push it.
First, uncertainty: you might have a compliance gap, and renewing makes it go away. Second, convenience: certification is difficult, renewal is simple. Both are sometimes true. Neither is a business case.
If renewal is right, your own deployment forecast will show it, and that document should exist before the conversation starts.
The third door, exit, is the most misunderstood, because people imagine walking away with nothing. You cannot exit a ULA without certifying, that is the mechanism. So exit means certify first, bank the perpetual position, and then reduce your Oracle footprint over time on your own schedule. That might mean migrating workloads, consolidating onto fewer processors, or moving support arrangements.
The certified position is what makes it possible: you own the licences, so you control the pace. That is why even organisations planning to leave Oracle should certify carefully rather than treat it as paperwork on the way out.
Here is the practical part that most organisations get wrong. The three doors look like a decision you make at the end, and it is not. The door you intend to walk through changes what you should be doing for the twelve months before. If you are certifying, you maximise deployment and evidence relentlessly.
If you are renewing, you build the growth case and preserve leverage rather than spending it. If you are exiting, you both maximise and start the migration planning in parallel. Choose the door early, provisionally, and let it direct the year. You can change your mind with new information.
You cannot recover the year.
The move from this briefing: write down which door you expect to walk through, and the one piece of evidence that would change your mind. If it is renewal, that evidence is a deployment forecast with named projects. If it is certification, it is your current deployment count. One page, agreed with your CIO, twelve months before term end.
Next session: maximisation, and how to lift the certified count by twenty to forty five percent before the window closes. See you there.
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