There’s a reason Data Intensity has conducted more than 200 Total Cost of Ownership for Transformation (TCOT) assessments for our Oracle client base over the past two years.
Highlights of the TCOT Process
This standardized assessment process, well-practiced by Data Intensity, involves precise data capture techniques for discovery, analysis, and design leading to cost-effective cloud migration solutions. The first step is an independent review of your current Oracle footprint, including all software applications, licenses, and integrated systems. Based on these findings, we create a TCO “transformation map” for the four Oracle-approved cloud platforms (Microsoft Azure, AWS, GCP, and OCI). This includes the total cost to migrate, upgrade, operate, and manage your entire Oracle estate in the cloud. The end game is arriving at the best strategy for your enterprise after a thorough comparison of available alternatives.
Two functional teams working together.
To successfully reach TCOT goals, Data Intensity combines the expertise of two key teams with the following complimentary responsibilities:
Software License Solutions (SLS) Team
The SLS team analyzes the effective license position of your existing on-premises landscape, in contrast to the cloud environment. They start by gathering data on company-wide usage of Oracle database, middleware, and E-Business Suite and outlining where all the products, features, and options are currently being used. Next, they recommend ways to mitigate or remediate license compliance, a critical step in the Design phase that enables you to realize cost savings as transitioning to the cloud.
Oracle Product Group
This group performs a comprehensive workload analysis, by mining data gathered by the SLS team. Using information from sources like Oracle Database AWR reports, SAR data from any Linux platforms, and operating statistics, the Oracle Product Group designs a new cloud solution to meet your specific needs, They also apply this data to optimize and consolidate your Oracle database architecture, improving performance as well as saving license and support spend.
Benefits of TCOT
Delivering what clients want.
Data Intensity’s dual approach responds to potential runaway costs in the cloud, using the TCOT assessment process as an opportunity to:
- Scale cloud resources to appropriately match the actual demand, avoiding under- or over-utilization
- Optimize and consolidate workloads onto a more powerful and cost-efficient platform
- Reduce Oracle license requirements and the associated cost of Oracle support
- Move to a subscription model over a bring your own license (BYOL) model, if applicable
- Reduce management and power/cooling required to run an on-premises data center
During the TCOT process, Data Intensity assesses your Oracle support expenditure to determine the cost-effectiveness of switching to an LI model. If such a switch is deemed beneficial over time, we also work with you and Oracle Support to terminate existing licenses, and the associated reduction in support, following the completed migration to the new cloud platform.
Cloud Migration Considerations
Knowledge is power
We all know that all cloud environments are not created equal. Regardless of the chosen platform, certain consequences need to be considered. Data Intensity validates and provides associated costs for not only the cloud migration, the architectural design, and consumption models, but also the licensing requirements for each option.
Licensing rules
Oracle publishes software licensing rules for the four approved cloud vendors, although these documents are very high-level and do not address the specifics that end users need to know. Taking these rules into account, Data Intensity goes a step further to create a performant, cost-efficient, and compliant cloud environment. For example, we consider your license position with AWS-optimized CPU instances versus Azure Active CPU shapes or OCI flexible shapes. Are they all the same? Do they follow the same licensing rules? The answer, clearly, is No.
Migrating licenses
How to handle licenses during your cloud migration period is another common concern. When creating a new platform that contains Oracle technology programs, unless you have sought prior permission, you need to license all the technology programs where they are installed and/or running, as per the Oracle Master Agreement (OMA) or Oracle License & Services Agreement (OLSA), referencing the License Definitions and Rules (LDR) document. Sound confusing? It definitely is.
So, if there is not a huge amount of existing shelfware, Oracle technology programs need to be licensed as soon as the ORACLE_HOME/WEBLOGIC_HOME is created on the virtual machine, i.e. when the technology programs are determined to be installed.
Parallel or term-based licenses
Within OCI, you can migrate without requiring additional licenses for a published 100 days. You can apply for a longer grace period, but this does not apply to third-party public clouds, such as AWS, Azure, or GCP. In those cases, consider the costs for running in parallel – having Oracle programs installed and running on your existing infrastructure while also being installed and ready to run on the new cloud platform.
Unless you are willing to take the risk, it makes sense to invest in term-based licenses during your migration period to guarantee you are in compliance. There are occasions to NOT parallel run; for example, if you are migrating to an AWS RDS license-included environment.
Leave it to the experts
TCOT assessments bring considerable economic value to different companies for different reasons. Outcomes are influenced by the original price paid for the Oracle stack and/or any discounts received, influencing the level of Oracle support. Yet all share one objective, which is to minimize cloud spending before, during, and after migration of their Oracle estate. The data obtained from a TCOT assessment gives your IT organization a true picture of all expected costs for more accurate planning, budgeting, and forecasting.
However, this type of assessment can be complex depending on your user community, computing assets, infrastructure, and ultimately the cloud you select. Navigating the intricate license requirements and compliance rules makes it even more complicated, not to mention factoring in scalability for accommodating business growth (or decline). So the question is, whether to go it alone or bring in outside resources?
Data Intensity has the expertise to help make strategic decisions about cloud adoption, ensuring you only pay for what you need and use. Our in-depth comparison of different cloud options provides transparency and insight into which platform most closely aligns with your business goals (increased productivity, financial gain, streamlining staff, etc.).
The diverse TCOT assessment challenges we have encountered enable us to target specific results through custom-designed transformation mapping, rather than a one-size-fits-all cloud migration model. We invite you to leverage our analytic capabilities to achieve the flexibility, scalability, and performance to match the big data and AI-driven workloads you run – today and tomorrow.
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