Yes, we need two million licences - DEFRA The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs and its agencies are still forking out vast amounts of taxpayer cash on no less than two million Oracle licences, despite efforts by the government to slash expensive annual ERP fees. According to a Freedom of Information response to El Reg, DEFRA and some other relatively …
If this was a fifth world country, the procurement clerk would have been sipping a mojito on the balkony of a 1000m^2 marble villa regardless of all US anti-bribery laws.
I am wondering what is the UK equivalent? Having your sprog attent a boy's only private school within a couple of miles radius of the Windsor castle?
Sadly the likely cause is not corruption. If it were it could be corrected rapidly and reasonably robust safeguards put in place to stop similar things happening. This is most probably almighty blithering stupidity, caused, supported and protected by standard procedures and practices and most likely the grand total of licences was reported with a slightly sheepish grin and a total lack of any idea how the number could be reduced.
Where does the 2m licence figure come from? The article says "£155 per employee - typically for many licences per head - at an annual cost of £1.3m", My calculator says that comes out at ~ 8,400 licenses. At the end of the article it then makes a guestimate of ~12,000 employees. 8,000 licences for 12,000 employees doesn't seem that strange.
Even if we take £155 per employee, and around 12,000 employees, then buying everyone a licence would mean ~ £2m total, not 2m licences
??
They're not licensing EBS per person. They're licensing by transaction. Hence the large number of 'licenses' which is basically the same as the number of expense claim lines plus purchase order lines.
Who the fuck decides to license per transaction in a 10,000 user environment rather than license per core? I don't understand Oracle licensing (very few people do, and I'm sure that's by design), but I know they offer per user licensing, and I know they offer per core licensing. One of those options is highly likely to prove more cost effective than using some (frankly bizarre) "per transaction" licensing approach.
You can colour my gast utterly flabbered as well o.O
You're confusing the technology licensing with the EBS licensing. The tech will either be by processor or by NUP. I suspect the former but I don't know.
There's then another set of licences to use the ERP. That's what's being paid by use and will be pennies per 'licence'. It was, at one point, the standard way of licensing purchase orders and expense management as it kept it simple.
El Reg and others (including HMG themselves who produced the chart in here http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/public-sector/2011/11/oracle-has-70-per-cent-of-soft.html) have done this article before and made the same mistake of conflating two very different licences and adding them up to give a single number. It's completely erroneous to do that conflation. Apples =/= pears.
There's then another set of licences to use the ERP. That's what's being paid by use and will be pennies per 'licence'. It was, at one point, the standard way of licensing purchase orders and expense management as it kept it simple.
The company I work for uses Oracle E-Business Suite including the OM and iProcurement modules. We license those per user. I was completely uninvolved in any of that decision making process (I'm support, not development) but I do know that in over a decade of using E-Business that we have never used per transaction licensing.
I am now intrigued as to how much we actually pay per user per year for E-Business, because I would be astonished if we actually are paying more than £150 per user per year for this, but I have literally no idea how much we do pay. I'll have to see if I can find out ^^;
"an individual licence is required each time a new employee expense claim is processed"
This, at first glance, seems to suggest a new licence is required each time an expense claim, by a new employee, is processed - so only one is required per new employee. If, as I suspect, its the other way round - a new licence is required for every time an employee submits a new expense claim - then I'm lost for words!
I remember when Oracle tried to pull this stunt with my company at the time telling us we needed a per transaction license for the database supporting our Online booking engine. Given that this was for a significant country-wide ecommerce site the license volumes were in the range given for DEFRA. Needless to say they were given a robust F*ck You until sense prevailed.
As others have stated I suspect there is a combination of conflating of different license types, plus some fast ones being pulled by Oracle salesmen against civil service PHB's who knew no better.
To be fair (if I must) I seriously doubt the Civil service were the only people to fall for this trick.
I remember when Oracle tried to pull this stunt with my company at the time telling us we needed a per transaction license for the database supporting our Online booking engine
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There is no such thing as a "per transaction Db license" as can easily be determined by looking at the online Oracle price list. HTF would you even determine what a transaction was, let alone measure it, or log it or charge it (since only the customer could be logging it they could anyway say "we did what we determine to be 4 transactions last year according to our log what we wrote so thats 4 quid we owe you".
I call bunkum.
This, at first glance, seems to suggest a new licence is required each time an expense claim, by a new employee, is processed - so only one is required per new employee. If, as I suspect, its the other way round - a new licence is required for every time an employee submits a new expense claim - then I'm lost for words!
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You only need be lost for words because the article is pretty much bunkum and so is what the quoted DEFRA spokesman said.
They will licence at so much for every 100,000 expense claims per year (whoever made them), or some such bulk transaction figure. Only a few items are licensed on this per transaction mechanism. Pay once every 100,000 (or whatever)
They will also licence each employee per head, one-off for HR. Do it once, dont need to do it again, ever.
To add the 100,000 transaction licenses to the employee count for HR makes no sense, its like adding up how many gallons of petrol you buy in a year, how many seats your car has, and then deciding your car uses that number of seats every year.
Sorry, when did we start down the path of paying a licence for every possible interaction on a system that's managed internally?
I do not believe there's a need for this, and I firmly believe it should have been looked into BEFORE you bought into such systems, rather than years later when higher government picks up on it.
Anything in the "per employee" range is ludicrous. Per seat, possibly. But even £70 per seat for a single piece of application software (which no doubt is operated by another licensed piece of software anyway) is at the absolute maximum top end for things that you cannot live without or do any other way.
Government IT... such a shower.
Microsoft haved stated that you need a licence for every user that picks up a DHCP address from a Windows based DHCP server whether that user access the network or files on the server or not.
They have also said that every printer that is managed via windows needs a licence and also that if you have a website hosted on a Windows server that uses any kind of login (whether that login is linked to an Active directory or just your own SQLite user DB) you need a licence for every public person that accesses your site.
Yes, I am not making this up - if you use IIS and there is any form of login, you need a windows CAL for every visitor!
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2014/12/01/DaLo_Microsoft_CAL_licensing/
I have a customer who virtualized their Oracle stuff, only to find out that the licensing now quadrupled.
The licensing is per processor that the system can run on, so going from one box with say 2 sockets to a cluster with four lots of two sockets = x4 more licenses needed, even though the bloody thing can only run on up to two of them and that is shared with other VMs.
V2P isn't something you do very often these days ...
Jon
Yes it is - if the virtualization is VMware. You have to license ALL the cores on the chassis, not only those on which the application is running.
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/partitioning-070609.pdf
If you use LPAR, Solaris containers or Oracle VM you can get around it, but it's been a major issue for VMware and Oracle for years
VM licensing is usually factor-based on core of host. Run Oracle RDBMS on VMs and it's usually something lower like 0.75/core ( totals rounded up to nearest whole number of course! )
No matter how you try to play them, they have a huge team of auditors and lawyers who will plug any loophole you try to find, then baffle you with the license calcs. Woe betide anyone who goes through a severe Oracle license audit, trust me the "Spanish Inquisition" would be a better experience!
Hardly surprising they're being trounced by SQL Server for new installations in a lot of companies. Been working with Oracle since 1995 but Oracle are not helping their customers and sooner or later they will need some when they will find out they don't have many left.
I'm not sure where you are getting your information, but it's totally incorrect.
There is a core multiplication factor applied based on chip architecture (generally 0.5 per core for intel chips - so one "processor" license is for two cores.
Running on virtual hosts is completely different. If its VMware you need to license all the cores on the chassis, not just those assigned to the application. If it's LPAR, Solaris Containers or Oracle VM you can create "hard partitions" and just license the cores assigned to the partition.
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/partitioning-070609.pdf
I will agree, though, that things can get ugly during audits - like zero discount and 30 days to get into compliance.
"a customer who virtualized their Oracle stuff"
Done the same with IBM WebSphere. Hideously expensive to start with, then put it onto a virtualized system (VM-Ware) and the cost multiplies by the number of cores you use to run other stuff. Crazy way to licence something and a good reason to move off it, onto something with a reasonable licencing model.
Not strange when you know what they are doing. They're licensing the database either by processor or application user and EBS on a transaction basis then El Reg are conflating them all as 'Oracle licences' as though they are equivalent. Which they're not.
They're still overpaying though.
While I'll be the first the line up and draw parallels between Oracle Licensing and a protection racket, so much of this doesn't stack up.
I've worked with both charities who believe they are too small to have any negotiation leverage and large corporates who will only deal with Oracle US (believing in a organ grinder/monkey relationship between Oracle US/UK). There are ways to optimise your licensing spend and Oracle bless them will even help you, via Oracle LMS if you ask the right questions and don't show too much of your working out.
Oracle technology licenses as Jon says above can be difficult to virtualise if you use the 'wrong' architecture in Oracle's view, equally so you can drive the costs down if use the 'right' one.
Maybe it is time to throw off the shackles of PAYE and go consulting after all......
Oracle would be that company that sold the enterprise software that all the really successful companies used in the early 2000's to predict the business environment - Big Successful companies like Enron, MCI/Worldcom, HealthCare South, Clearstream ... good stuff!
So, how's it working out for the UK government then?
Clearly there's room for substantial cost savings, quite apart from a deep need to remove whomever signed off on the use of so much Oracle from public service. 30 citizens per licence is readily managable all the way down the database stack to Access; you don't use a Bugatti Veyron to pop to Tesco, and you certainly don't need so many Oracle licences to run a trivial government department. If heads don't roll, lessons will not be learned.
"Clearly there's room for substantial cost savings, quite apart from a deep need to remove whomever signed off on the use of so much Oracle from public service. "
It's not just they signed off on the use of so much Oracle, it's that they did so in an appallingly silly way. The first cost saving to cut is the salary of that person & everyone else who approved / supervised them
" If heads don't roll, lessons will not be learned."
Culture survives the elimination of individuals. What's needed is the complete closure of DEFRA. As far as I can see they don't do much of any use, other than refuse to accept scientific evidence on everything from BSE to bovine TB, fail to fight effectively for British agriculture in Europe, at the same time ignore scientific advice on fisheries whilst still selling British fishermen down the river, etc etc.
I'm with the badgers, and I vote for all of DEFRA to be gassed in their offices, or be trapped in cages as they commute to and from work, and then shot by marksmen.
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Oracle DERP.
Spec out the use case (expense processing), then implement that (couple of developers + DBA for PGSQL) and the overall cost will still be a fraction of the Oracle licensing costs.
And you have developers to implement more features in the future as well as maintaining the system.
The issue is that Government didn't want developers in house, when it could give money to their freinds who run consulting businesses, so this really isn't an option now.
I'm guessing the Oracle DBAs they have will be consultants rather than in-house too.
Bung a few million at the likes of PostgreSQL to implement functionality / support required and enjoy free, unlimited use forever.
Perhaps Oracle and its ilk are vitally important for certain functionality - payrolls, benefits processing etc. where there may be millions of records to process in a timely fashion. But I suspect 99% of government use cases do not require this at all or the enormous complexity / horsepower / administrative overhead that goes with providing it.
Oracle license either per user or per core. They are very open to negotiation and a site license is usually the best (but depends on how the organisation uses it i.e. do they lots of user connecting to one database or lots of users and lots of databases and so on).
If you virtualise Oracle (say on VMWare) you need to license the entire VM cluster. You don't see many virtualised Oracle environments!
For Oracle, £150 / user isn't actually that bad!
Actually you do see quite a lot of visualized Oracle environment but they are generally done with Oracles Hypervisor which allows for hard partitioning thus removing the requirement to license all cores in a cluster or on a host.
As already noted above though the issue doesn't seem to be with the cost of licensing the data centre so much as the idiotic decision to license through transactions. If they have indeed done this then someone needs to lose their job and/or have their several Caribbean mansions audited.
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