Only 3 weeks before Oracle’s Fiscal year ends, so the Oracle Sales teams are increasingly putting effort in making some deals to meet their forecast.
Blog: Oracle Contract renewals
They probably already contacted you to see if you need any additional products, can move you (partly) to the cloud or push you to renew your Maintenance & Support (M&S) contracts, often expiring end of May as well.
This is the time to negotiate the best deal! The following key actions will help you:
- Read your contracts (Master Agreement, Order Docs, ULA’s, yearly invoices), understand the limitations, do’s & don’ts but also possibilities within these contracts. Don’t forget to check the discounts, entities (limitations in usage), and metrics;
- Gather the IT-related organisational strategy, also keeping any forecasted structural changes in mind. A clear vision will faster lead to a fitting offer from Oracle, meeting your requirements;
- Determine your Effective License Position (ELP) to understand if you are compliant and to know what your business needs, but also what software is unused and what therefore is suitable for negotiation (migration, termination, ‘Customer-to-Cloud’);
- Define and prepare negotiation strategy with involved stakeholders, often Purchase, Legal, Finance. When prepared correctly, taking necessary steps to be able to close a good deal in time will be easier.
Being prepared and ready for negotiating is the essence, and preferably starts a few months before contract renewal. However, a lot of organisations do lack the time and just renew their contracts. By doing so they are missing the opportunity to optimise their contracts, save on Costs, be Compliant and get/stay in Control.
Need a hand for a Quick Win?
Softline Solutions will gladly help organisations by setting up a high-over screening of these key actions. Our experts can also assist you in negotiating with Oracle, rationalising issues and offers, to be able to harvest the “low-hanging fruit” for this renewal.
After this timeframe, a deep-dive is possible as well, preparing you for next year, or whenever contracts are to be renewed.
Aside from the assistance regarding M&S renewals, Softline Solutions experts can also assist in
pre-audit baselines of any software publisher – including a list of risks and mitigation actions, setting up a suitable Audit Protocol, audit-defence support and avoidance of heavy settlements. Our experts have successfully helped many of our customers already regarding IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Adobe, VMware, MicroFocus and others!