Licence Management Today

Today we have an interview with our guest Alex Andrew, Managing Director of Lime Software. This is the third in a series of interviews with prominent experts in the Software Asset management software tools arena.Alex will also feature in our latest podcast ‘Licence Management Today – Episode 08′ The interview is by Kay Williams.In this interview Alex discusses the two products offered by Lime Software, namely Lime Inventory Tool and Lime License Manager. Both products are license management systems just for Oracle. The tools’ key focus is on databases but also supports middleware, and e-business suite.Alex gives a good explanation of the significance of being part of the group of Oracle verified Tools; which in summary means the customer can be certain that they have the same data Oracle would use in an audit.The interview runs through the main pros and cons of agentless versus agent-based discovery tools. There’s also some good advice on how to be prepare to deal with an Oracle audit.Listen to the interview for an insight of the speed and flexibility Lime Software offer customers.

This is the first in a series of interviews with prominent experts in the Oracle world. For me Oracle Database is just the Database – “Crème de la Crème”. The Standard Edition Database is like a Rolls-Royce or Maserati Ghibli without the air-condition. This database edition is still a “wow”. The Maserati I do not yet have, but the Oracle Standard Edition (=SE) Database I know how to “drive”. Ann Sjokvist In this interview, Ann shares her vast experience of using Oracle Standard edition over the years. Ann shows that with some creativity the shortfalls in not being able to use the enterprise options can be overcome. Ann sees Oracle Standard edition as a very viable option that should be considered by large and small enterprises alike. Unless the customer really needs Advanced Security most other requirements can be handled through additional scripting or the use of third-party tools. The price of Oracle Standard Edition plus the potential cost of additional people hours and third party tools still provides excellent value for customers. Ann also shares some useful tools and sources: Carlos Sierra. EDB360 provides a number of reports giving a 360-degree view of an Oracle Database Toad for Oracle Database admin and development tool DBVisit – replication and standby solutions Tanal Poder’s Snapper, provides superb trouble shooting scripts.

Today we have an interview with our guest John Lunt, Managing Director of Certero. This is the second in a series of interviews with prominent experts in the Software Asset management software tools arena. The interview is carried out by our very own Jane McCulloch and hosted by Kay Williams. It was a pleasure to talk to John and learn about the new version of Asset Studio. To contact John please visit Certero.com See the full transcript at http://madora.co.uk/oracle-software-asset-management-interview-with-john-lunt-of-certero/

Today we have our first ‘Featured’ interview with our guest Maxime Pawlak, Managing Director of Easytrust. We have lined up a number of very interesting people over the coming months to share their expertise and knowledge in the areas of Software Asset Management, Oracle Licensing and influential IT trends in general. Maxime will also feature in our next podcast ‘Licence Management Today – Episode 05′. The full transcript of the interview between Kay and Maxime is on our blog. It was a pleasure to talk to Maxime, who is extremely knowledgeable about the Oracle Compliance marketplace and provides a lot of experiences and know how. Some Highlights below: Maxime: We’re part of the software asset management market, we are specific on that market because we only address Oracle. Usually people, they separate the software management market in the inventory tools and the software management tools and some tools which can do both of them. We can do both of them, we do inventory and we do software asset management but we just do it for Oracle and we can do it right. We can bring up value audits around Oracle licenses problems and solutions. In terms of industry customers we address, we address every single industry who are Oracle customers so it concerns every industry. Kay: Okay, as a non-technical person could you explain to me what the differences between the inventory tools and the software asset management? Maxime: Of course, yes. The inventory tools, it’s all about discovering which are the software installed on the laptops or the servers of customers. It’s about with agents or agent-less technologies connecting to that servers or to that laptops and grab some information about the presence of the software installed or not. This is the inventory part of the market and there are some tools in the market which just do inventory. They are especially focused on that feature. The software asset management part of the market is more about consolidating data which can be provided by inventory tools but it also can be provided by CMDBs or different tools which are already installed in the companies. They provide different features like the ability to put into the tool all the contracts, what other licensing that I have bought. It also provide the ability to get the data from the inventory tools and work on that data in order to reconsolidate this data with the contract information. Most of them, they have catalog with SKUs, which is the unique identifier of the software, and they are the SKU catalog and they can match this SKU of the software which has been bought with the software which has been discovered. Providing that, they can provide some compliance position by comparing what you have bought and what you have deployed. They also provide some capabilities about optimization, the software and the licenses. Sometimes they provide some process and processing of your software asset management policies in terms of workflows or integrations with third party tools. It’s a little bit different on the market. Kay: It sounds like an inventory tool like yours should be part of any SAM programme, would that be correct? Maxime: Yes, the software asset management programme could be run without any tools, but as you know you need to have correct data in order to be able to do software asset management so you will definitely have a question of “should I buy an inventory tool” or “do I already have some tools in my company that I can use or extend in order to grab this information I already have somewhere, but I don’t use?” Maxime: Well, yes, what’s important to understand about the Easytrust tool is that it has been verified by Oracle, so we’re part of support vendor verification program. Kay: What does that mean as opposed to a tool that’s not verified by Oracle? Maxime: It means for database because this programme is only for database option and management packs, the tool can be used as a source of data in case of audits. You just have to push one button and you export the equivalent of the Oracle’s scripts results. It means the process is much more easy to run this audit and you are much more secure about the usage of that tool compared to another tool which is not verified. Kay: Oracle will take the data from your tool and rely on that data? Maxime: Yes, exactly. I just want to clarify a confusion which is usually made. Data which is taken by Oracle in the verification process, it’s a kind of raw data, it’s not calculated computer data. So one verified tool is not equivalent to another verified tool because what interests customers is not the raw data, it’s the computer data, the calculated data. There are many, many huge differences in the markets between different inventory tools. Some are generalists, we do on the Oracle and we claim to be able to do it very accurately. We’ve seen that on several customers on which we work. We’ve seen different tools, there is all the provide, it’s a generalist approach. The very specific Oracle rules on every kind of server, on every kind of operating system, every version of it, it’s very hard to implement a tool which to complete and accurate compute of that data. I have to say that, we don’t provide the records during the audit, we don’t provide the calculated data, we provide the raw data. It means that there could be a difference between the results of what Oracle tells at the end of the audit and what the tool says. It’s all about it, the quality of the tool, even if it has been verified by Oracle, it’s a good point, it’s a good start because the verification process tells you at least what are all the data you need to grab and to control from the inventory part in order to propose a proper inventory. It’s not enough, then you have to implement the compute that data to provide how many licenses do I need. For now, even Oracle LMS is doing that kind of job manually using the results of the scripts or using the exports of the verified tools. Kay: Great. What about the cloud? Are you seeing take-up with this and does this present new challenges? Maxime: [The Cloud…] this is changing many things in terms of licensing for Oracle. They are specific rules for Amazon and Azure, also for Oracle public cloud and for private clouds as it goes with virtualization, this has also a huge impact on the licenses and it brings new challenges, but it also brings great opportunities. We now put the cloud insights in every review we do. We start to propose to our customers to migrate part of their infrastructure to the public cloud. It could be development and tests, for example, environment, it could be the Amazon or the Oracle cloud and we also propose them to change their infrastructure and to create while they change, a private cloud because it’s how people do it now, it’s all about automation. We don’t want DBAs to do the same tasks a hundred times a day, we just want to automate everything and it’s a big change in the Oracle future. You can learn more about Easytrust and the ‘Easytrust License Management for Oracle ‘ solution at Easytrust.com. If you would like to get in touch with Maxime simply leave a message on the contact form. You can also follow them on all the social media platforms including Twitter @Easyblogs

News Roundup and one of our most popular articles "10 Oracle Negotiation Myths" Oracle CEO issues warning to competitors Mark Hurd, Oracle’s CEO was very bullish about the future of Oracle in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street”, given on Thursday the 29th January. CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street“ The interview on CNBC.com can be found on this link http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000350362 In the interview Mark Hurd talks about his Cloud strategy, providing best of breed SaaS solutions for Marketing Automation, Human Capital Management in their own right as well as suites of applications. Larry Ellison CTO announces the new generation of Engineered Systems – Exadata X5 On January 21st Oracle’s CTO Larry Ellison presented Oracle’s strategy for reducing customer costs and increasing value with a new generation of engineered systems, including Oracle’s new Virtual Compute Appliance X5, Oracle FS1 Series Flash Storage System, and sixth-generation Oracle Exadata Database Machine X5. Software licensing trends present significant risks for unprepared businesses Oklahoman Published: February 1, 2015 I came across this very interesting article in the Oklahoman. Drew T. Palmer, an Oklahoma attorney with Crowe & Dunlevy’s Intellectual Property group, explains some pitfalls for businesses in licensing. Oracle and Samsung joining forces for mobile cloud collaboration? The Korean Times reported a meeting between Oracles’ CEO Mark Hurd and Samsung’s mobile chief Shin Jong-Kyun. 10 Oracle Negotiation Myths – Part 1 Myth – “A widely held but false belief or idea.” In the Oracle eco-system a number of myths and misconceptions have grown up around purchasing from Oracle. These are myths I’ve heard from talking to customers regularly. Perhaps you also know a few you can share. Here are our top 10 Myths: My company is too small to get a good discount. Oracle say their products lines are not connected and won’t give me discount across all products. Oracle say I need to buy a ULA to solve a non compliance. I am told I can’t have products on a price hold that I have not bought. I want to do an annual true up like Microsoft but told I can’t. I want to buy licences using a non standard metric. I am told if I don’t buy this quarter the discount agreed will go. If I wait to the end of the quarter I will get a better deal. If I buy through a partner I will pay more. I can’t decrease my support and maintenance below 22%.

So news last month of Thomas Kurian, Larry Ellison and Flexcube in the cloud. The featured article this episode is one of our most popular posts, “5 Fatal Mistakes of Oracle licensing.” For all you kind people who have downloaded, please provide feedback and questions. We would love to address any questions on the show. I am currently reaching out to a bunch of very interesting people to have on the show. If you would like to be on the show please get in touch. Thomas Kurian Promoted to President Almost four months since Larry Ellison handed his CEO title to both Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, he has now promoted Thomas Kurian to President. The forty-eight year old was EVP for product development having started his Oracle career leading the Middleware strategy. He helped take Oracle to a leader in the Middleware with the suite of Middleware tools. Larry helps the critters Larry is clearly a busy man and is putting some of his substantial wealth to helping establish a Wildlife breeding and animal rehab centre in the Santa Cruz mountains. Read more at NBC The Bay Area News Oracle Cloud runs a new UK Bank Hampden & Co. will be running Oracle’s core banking solution Flexcube on Oracle cloud. Oracle will run the application as a managed service on Oracle Sparc T5 out of the UK Oracle data center in Linlithgow, just outside Edinburgh, Scotland. Hampden Group run a diversified set of services in the insurance and finance sectors. They announced last year that they would be taking a significant stake in a new bank for private clients called Hampden & Co plc. oracle licensing rules – 5 Fatal Mistakes “Five Fatal Oracle License Mistakes”, alright the title is a bit dramatic, but the following 5 mistakes crop up on such a regular basis that we at Madora believe they are worth reiterating. For those experienced with Oracle, they will know the following as classic gotchas and will keep an eye out. IT professionals and Procurement Officers new to the ways of Oracle may get caught out – so be warned. Let’s walk through some of the five common areas that often have disastrous consequences. The Five Fatal Mistakes are: 1. Virtualising without fully understanding the implications. The issue we see time after time is misunderstanding Oracle licensing on VMware. So why is this? It’s to do with server partitioning. Server partitioning can be very confusing; it is designed to limit the amount of processor resource available to a program; it is nothing to do with the Oracle Database Partitioning extra cost option – that is a means of partitioning data tables. Oracle simplifies server partitioning into two groups; the methods that it refuses to recognise as valid, known as “Soft Partitioning”; and those it accepts really do subdivide servers, known as “Hard Partitioning”. Probably the most popular server partitioning method is VMware, a very flexible form of partitioning and a great means of managing a datacentre. Guess what? It is soft partitioning for Oracle; this means that it is incredibly easy to fall foul of Oracle’s licensing rules. How your VCenter is set up, the clusters, the VMs, the storage architecture all have an impact on licensing. VMware publish guidelines on how to license Oracle but Oracle don’t support their view; great fun when it is your turn for Oracle’s regular license audit! Oracle’s approach to VMware has changed even further since the release of VMware Version 5.1 with its more advanced DRS/VMotion capabilities and its shared storage functionality. Seek independent help to review your architecture and any planned changes; don’t assume anything!! 2. Disaster Recovery scenarios not licensed correctly This can be a complex area with technologies changing all the time. We highly recommend you speak to Madora Consulting if you have any doubts as to whether you are correctly licensed for DR architectures. In general we advise that you assume you need to be licensed fully and then check to see if your scenario falls under failover and whether the 10 day rule applies. In terms of licensing be aware that you cannot mix metrics. In other words if processors are used for the primary site then the backup site also needs to be licensed by processor. A common mistake is believing that Named User Plus licenses can be used for the backup site – in the hope of saving money. You are better off ring fencing the DR servers contractually and negotiating a reduced cost for this license pool. Also make sure that the options and management packs are licensed, as these are often forgotten. In short, scenarios where the Primary and Secondary nodes share a SAN, with the secondary node acting as a failover, only the Primary needs to be licensed. This is valid as long as the failover to the secondary lasts less than 10 days per year, which includes any testing. Any standby or mirroring environments must be fully licensed. See the Oracle paper on DR pricing http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/data-recovery-licensing-070587.pdf 3. Non production environments not licensed. With Oracle you do need a valid license for development environments, test environments and any pre-production environments. This whole article assumes standard terms and conditions but you may have negotiated non standard options, so do check. Test and development must be correctly licensed. Use of OTN licenses does not necessarily mean you are licensed correctly for Development environments. (Note -the environment used by end users for business or other operations is called a production environment.) Oracle Technology Network licenses for development Some developers are aware of the Oracle Technology network where licenses can be downloaded. OTN does offer a restricted license grant but this too is often misunderstood. The OTN license is really for the use of a single developer whom wishes to try out a piece of software. The license is only allowed for one user and one server. We have seen cases of whole development teams assuming that the OTN licenses give them the right to develop an application as they have not moved into production but this is not the case. See below an extract from the OTN license document: “Customers also may download Oracle technology products from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) at http://otn.oracle.com/software/. In order to download an Oracle product from OTN, customers must signify their agreement to the terms of the OTN Development License. This limited license gives the user the right to develop, but not to deploy, applications using the licensed products. It also limits the use of the downloaded product to one person, and limits installation of the product to one server. Customers may not use products licensed under the OTN Development License in connection with any classroom activity, internal data processing operations, or any other commercial or production use purposes..” If you do use the OTN licenses and work within the restriction i.e. one user, one server as soon as the application developed moves into production the correct licenses must be purchased. We know from talking to Oracle that they do monitor downloads, particularly for the more specialised products and will look for inconsistencies, i.e. a known live environment with 20 downloads could imply that developers are using the software when they should be licensed. 4. Database options typically for the Enterprise Manager Packs are often installed by default but not purchased. This one still crops up either because the DBAs have installed the options as this is the default on installations or because the DBAs assume that the options have been purchased. The reality is that most DBAs really do need the testing, tuning and diagnostic packs. They are almost a prerequisite to managing Oracle estates. Most of us would almost regard them as part of the core database. Unfortunately they are still chargeable options so must be purchased. Some confusion still exists as the Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) Database Control and Grid control are provided free of charge. But they need the chargeable packs to really add value and these need licenses to cover the applications that are being monitored. See an extract from Chapter 10 of the Oracle® Enterprise Manager Licensing Information (found on the home page of the OEM documentation) specifically states; “The base installation of Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c includes several features free of charge with the purchase of any Oracle software license or Support contract”. It is not unusual for small to mid-sized groups to legally install a Cloud Control free of charge on a spare server in their area. As indicated, a basic install, with no frills, is included with any supported license. A very common pitfall for organisations facing difficulties with their Oracle license management comes from not having the right options granted and management packs installed for their needs. When the Oracle Enterprise Database Edition server is installed, by default all the enterprise options are installed too and it is important to know what you are actually using and whether you need it. There are two aspects to this, firstly you need to know what databases are installed and what editions they are i.e. standard or enterprise. Secondly, you need to know whether any management packs have been “accepted” or options “granted”, to use Oracle’s terminology. Interpreting this incorrectly can significantly affect licensing costs from anywhere between US$163,000 and US$800,000 per processor, because options and management packs require additional licensing and should not be present if not needed as this rapidly adds to the total cost. 5. License Minimums not understood, so Named User Plus licenses not counted correctly. A number of products have a minimum number of licenses that must be purchased, fairly standard software practice in the industry. However, there is added complexity with Oracle wit

Thanks for Downloading this episode. Thanks again for the feedback on the previous first episode. The sound quality was not great and we had a few bloopers. I hope this recording is a little better. If you would like to contribute or have any Oracle licence questions please contact me via the contact page at Madora.co.uk or email me. [email protected] Does 12c Multi-tenant offer real opportunity for cost savings through consolidation? For those not familiar with Oracle 12c, which was released in June last year, it offers a host of new features. The ‘C’ in 12c stands for Cloud and it is focused firmly on providing a back bone for the Oracle Cloud strategy. With all the announcements around cloud, DBaaS, PaaS and the like, I thought it worthy of giving an introduction to Oracle 12c for the non technical – well not too technical. Some four years in development this was a major release with a fundamental new architecture. Oracle Database 12c provides a bunch of extras such as database consolidation, query optimisation, performance tuning, high availability, partitioning, backup and recovery. Tom Kyte does a nice job of explaining the new features in YouTube for those who are a bit more technically minded. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekTTXoHBmWw&feature=youtu.be It is the database consolidation capability via pluggable databases that really are the game changer for consolidation. Officially now known as multi-tenant, this is a paid for option that could have a massive impact on the cost of building and running a large database estate. So what is the multi-tenant option? In simple terms I like to think of the Multi-tenant option as an egg box which is the container database, holding many eggs which are the pluggable databases. The egg box provides the ability to share its memory and background processes across the many eggs it holds. The egg box holds the metadata and the eggs hold the user data. Traditional database architecture requires each database instance to have a discrete set of memory and storage allocated to it. Sometimes this results in poorly utilised resources. Clearly as your database estate grew you could find yourself buying more memory and storage on a regular basis. This also has an impact on management as more effort is required to manage and maintain the hardware infrastructure as well as the growing instances of databases. Add the non-production environments and the disaster recovery and backup options and the physical servers can soon sprawl. One of the solutions pursued by a great number of organisations to the physical server sprawl was the use of virtualisation software. Although this has greater benefits in physical server reduction it still required each oracle database instance to have its own resources set aside. Multi-tenant databases offer an additional level of consolidation by sharing the database resources amongst the pluggable databases. You can create up to 253 pluggable databases all managed as a single instance via the container database. That is one giant egg box! In production environments it is not uncommon to see 20 different instances all requiring routine maintenance from upgrades, patches, tuning, back up and configured for RAC and Data Guard. With Oracle 12c Multi-tenant all 20 instances can be treated as one. A DBA can easily plug or unplug an existing database to or from a container database. There is no need to change any code in the application. When the user connects to a plugged database, the database environment looks exactly as if the user had connected to a traditional database. The Multi-tenant option helps provide the following: High consolidation density: Many databases can share memory and background processes, reducing significant hardware. Provisioning: A database can be unplugged from one environment and plugged into another in seconds using SQL commands. Spinning up and cloning new instances for test and dev is now a breeze. Patching and upgrades: Patch a new container. Now unplug from the un-patched container and plug into the patch container – job done. Manage many databases as one: Do your routine tasks like back up on the container database not individual instances. An order of magnitude when you consider a container can hold 253 databases! Resource management: The Oracle Resource Manager feature can work at the pluggable database level for you to manage resource competition among the databases in your environment. In the words of Oracle senior vice president Andy Mendelsohn, Pluggable databases represent “a fundamental rearchitecture of the [Oracle] database. Now if I’m an administrator, I have one database overall to administer.” Can 12c really deliver substantial cost savings? There is no denying there are cost benefits to be gained through increased agility via rapid cloning, reduced overheads in management and lower hardware infrastructure. It was a disappointment to a number of customers that this became a paid option. This cost should be offset by the lower demand for compute, storage hardware and people costs. The elephant in the room though is the impact on licence costs. Seeing the real benefit of reduced licence fees will be a challenge. We all know how Oracle likes to safeguard its support revenues. Although a significant reduction in Database cores could result, this will need to be offset by the purchase of the 12c Multi-tenant option which is some 37% of the list price of Enterprise Edition. Even a recalculation of the support fees after dropping a number of database cores should make a contribution. I don’t know how many references Oracle has of customers using the 12c Multi-tenant option in anger. I guess not too many. I am sure that there is an opportunity for early adopters to make a good case to negotiate a great deal. Some serious analysis and modelling will be required to work through cost savings on existing deployments. Green field and new projects will be great candidates for Oracle 12c and you would be almost crazy not to use it. So what do you think? Have you starting looking at 12c in terms of consolidation? Does it stack up?

Thank you for downloading. Please find us online at Madora.co.uk. Would love to hear from you. Drop me a line via email [email protected] Is Oracle starting to wake up to the demand of its users for more cloud capabilities and flexible licence models? With recent announcements in Oracle OpenWorld 2014, is Oracle starting to wake up to the demand of its users for more cloud capabilities and flexible licence models? Oracle’s core business has, like many of the larger enterprise software companies been focused on selling software designed to run on premise and charging a flat fee for the licenses and typically an annual support and maintenance fee. Over the last fifteen years we have seen a number of application providers providing access to their application via subscription models that do not require the purchase of any infrastructure – database, application servers, operating systems, networking or and hardware servers. Although Larry Ellison has in the past been quick to poo poo cloud computing he has clearly woken up to the industry shift. “We have a new, much-upgraded cloud platform,” Ellison said to his key note speech on the 28th September. “We are just getting started. We launched our real platform this month.” Previously the only options for customers to run Oracle in the cloud on a true subscription basis was via Amazon or Azure. Oracle will “have the same pricing as Amazon or any other infrastructure provider,” Chairman Larry Ellison said at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. Oracle has seemed to be behind in many ways with regards to providing utility or SaaS type pricing. Sure Oracle would argue that Fusion Apps have been available for a while and the cloud application portfolio is increasing all the time. However most customers still run ‘on the premise applications’ which are fundamentally different than the Fusion Apps which were written from scratch for the cloud. It is these traditional ERP/CRM/SCM legacy applications that present a number of problems for customers: Licensing metrics are often not clear. It does not allow for the growth or decline of the business. It does not allow for spikes or seasonal peaks. It does not lend itself for innovation, testing of new concepts. It does not allow a trial to review business benefits or ROI. So what about customers that have written their own apps running on Oracle or use vendor apps based on Oracle? Many want to pay for Oracle technology licences as a subscriptions whether on premise on their own kit or on the cloud.Clearly Oracle is moving this way with enhancements to its PaaS services. See https://cloud.oracle.com/database The fully ‘Oracle managed’ Oracle database is yet to make an appearance but pricing is available for a number of options. For example the client managed option for High Performance Enterprise Edition is $4,000 / Month per OCPU. This sounds high but it does include a large number of management, testing and security database options. The pricing is also available by the hour so it is absolutely possible to use this for testing, development or backup. It’s per OCPU – not sure what that really means. When I get a better idea I will let you know. Where I see the real opportunity is for the duel running of new systems. Previously the only real option for customers to run new systems in parallel for a period before switch over was to buy 1 year term licenses in order to remain compliant. Cloud Alternatives The current alternatives to Oracle’s cloud services are Amazon http://aws.amazon.com/oracle/ or Microsoft’s Azure. Amazon Web Services and Oracle Amazon RDS for Oracle allows you to bring your own licences or use Oracle included licences. Costs start from 0.04 USD per hour for the on-demand licence included option which means that running an oracle application really is more affordable than ever. Bring you own licence starts at 0.025 USD. There does appear to be one downside of the licence included option and that is the database is Standard Edition 1. This could mean that applications that use Enterprise option will not be able to take advantage of this. While this may not provide the licence subscription desirable for most enterprise applications, for developers this could be a more effective way to run proof of concepts. What about cannibalisation of revenues? One of the main criticisms of Oracle not being so quick to adopt subscription based licence models for Database and Middleware was the concerns about cannibalisation of its existing revenue streams. Last month in the Oracle earnings call Oracle reported fiscal first-quarter profit and sales that were below analysts’ projections. Oracle also forecast Q2 revenues and profits below estimates. Oracle is investing in its cloud division and there is a big drive within Oracle to push managed cloud services with big incentives for its sales teams. On the same call Safra Catz, Oracle co-CEO said,”As the movement to the cloud grows, we expect this transition will affect our revenue to the positive”. See full earnings transcript on Seeking Alpha.So in summary , I welcome the announcements in OpenWorld 2014. It is a good start and it should provide some alternative flexible options for customers who want a subscription based pricing. This will present some organisational challenges especially around its sales division. Sure customers are going to continue to run software on premise but do Oracle really need all those sales people? So what do you think? Does Oracle or even Amazon present a viable alternative now? Will you use it?