By Evan Boyd SLC Vice President of Business Development
There’s been a lot of media coverage in recent months regarding Oracle Executive Chairman Larry Ellison’s push to become a major player in the Cloud space. We hear from clients every day that their Oracle sales reps are leaning hard to get them into the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
This push comes in many forms. Stability has certainly been used as a major selling point vs. competitors such as Amazon. But for existing clients, it can also come in the form of settling audits by forgiving penalties in exchange for coming aboard OCI – something we’ve seen frequently of late. We’ve even seen Oracle offer discounts for on-premise license support if you have things running in OCI.
Whatever the reasons you’re given about why you should move to the Oracle Cloud, we have one bit of advice: Don’t do it.
With the Oracle Cloud comes forced Oracle support because, as with all Oracle support, it’s what’s best and most lucrative for Oracle. It’s also a strategy to get your on-prem licenses hosted on OCI under the guise of reducing the future risk of license exposure. Once you’re on OCI, it will be difficult to ever unwind and move to another provider, and you can forget about saving any money in the future through third-party support of your products.
The bottom line is that Oracle’s drive to aggressively grow its customer base and lock them into contracts has not changed. There are always terms and policies you need to be aware of that will force you to remain on its Cloud and support. Oracle’s ultimate goal is to move you from a perpetual license that you own, supported or not, and move you to a subscription model where you own nothing, and your data is only available as long as you continue to pay.
And once you’re locked in, there’s no guarantee prices won’t increase. As an example, if you owned Hyperion on-premise and you moved to Oracle’s cloud EPM product two years ago, you would have purchased what was available then as an enterprise cloud license. Since that time, Oracle has changed the licensing model and what once was the product you needed has now become their standard version – if you want the features that make the product work the way you intended, you’ll have to upgrade to the “new” enterprise cloud license at a higher price tag.
If you’re considering an Oracle Cloud contract, get a free, no obligation review from the Original Oracle Licensing Experts. Contact us at info@slc.us.com or call (925) 961-9741.
