As we engage with clients, one question is coming up more often “How do I reduce my spend with Oracle?” Many go further and ask, “how can I migrate completely away from Oracle?” The situation is clear, Oracle is using targeted sales tactics and actively driving clients to the Oracle Cloud.
Oracle is compelling clients to migrate lock stock and barrel to the Oracle Cloud. This march is being driven by highly motivated Oracles sellers with clear cut incentives in place where cloud adoption is the only option.
Against this backdrop what are clients to do? An alternative strategy exists; the IBM strategy can be summed up in the 3 words – STOP | SWAP | DROP
STOP
If you are one of the disenfranchised Oracle clients, then the first thing to do is to stop spending more money with Oracle. This approach sounds difficult given how pervasive the deployment of unlimited license agreements is within organizations, but it must be a conscious directive that comes from the top of the organization.
After you have stopped, you need to take stock. Firstly, your organization needs to find all your agreements with Oracle, dig out all the old emails, build your transaction history. As you undertake this effort, you will need an expert to help make sense of your position with Oracle, the team at Palisade Compliance are the best in the business. Palisade Compliance has decades of experience navigating through Oracle agreements and can help position you against threatened audits by Oracle. IBM can offer a free 45-day assessment so that you can start to wrestle back control.
DROP
Once you have your license position established, you need to commit to dropping you’re spend with Oracle. This step shouldn’t be taken lightly but real rewards exist. You can exit your ELA; it is not a commercial reality that you must always renew. Palisades are able to guide you through the process of how to terminate your ELA.
The process begins with you selecting a platform that facilitates the need for fewer licenses to run your Oracle environment and then they will need to find alternatives for the prevailing Oracle hardware solutions i.e., Exadata and legacy UNIX systems such as Solaris. Don’t worry alternatives exist- IBM LinuxONE, a highly engineered OLTP beast built to deliver mission-critical Linux workloads at scale with the most robust security from the silicon to the hypervisor. The combination of IBM Flash Systems such as the 9200 and 7200 with LinuxONE makes a compelling proposition. IBM’s database powerhouse leverages the world’s fastest commercially available processor and other technologies such as on-chip compression and encryption to drive huge consolidations of Oracle workloads. Clients often see in excess of a 10:1 consolidation ratio when deploying Oracle on LinuxONE enabling them to do the same work on 90%+ less cores than comparable commodity x86 servers. IBM total cost of ownership studies can illustrate that LinuxONE delivers on average 50% savings and as high as 65% in larger environments through the potential 10:1 core consolidation ratio. Less cores = Less licenses. As you deploy your Oracle workload on LInuxONE you will be leveraging Red Hat
If you want to go one step further, then this is the time to explore 3rd party software support. In a recent survey Forrester interviewed 266 customers with experience using IBM Multi-Vendor Support (MVS). Through interviewing and surveying these customers, Forrester concluded that IBM MVS provides organizations net benefits of over $3.1 million over three-years. This option allows you to go further and save as much as 50% on the ongoing support of your Oracle estate. IBM partners with the leader in the space, Spinnaker, as part of our Multi-Vendor Support offering.
SWAP
Once you have a solid picture of your commercial position with regard to Oracle, and you have dropped your spend through leveraging LinuxONE, and potentially 3rd party software support – what do they do next? The next step in your strategy should be to find alternatives to the Oracle software stack and deploy these alternatives in a micro-services architecture leveraging technology such as Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform.
Whether it is Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux operating system or the PostgreSQL database, solid mission-critical level alternatives exist. These open-source alternatives leverage the best of the open-source movement coupled with proven support structures from companies such as Red Hat and Fujitsu. Fujitsu Enterprise PostgreSQL (FEP) fully exploits LinuxONE encryption and compression, meaning back-ups run 40% faster and is also fully supported in OpenShift Container Platform.
Your migration will take time, but you will quickly realize significant savings through consolidation and right sizing of the license estate. Additionally, as you migrate to open source, you can expect significant reduction in Oracle license costs.
Summary
You deserve choice and flexibility to choose your IT strategy, you deserve to be able to deploy a hybrid multi-cloud strategy based on Open-Source technology and the benefits it will bring to your organization. Being locked into a vendor, any vendor is not a strategic choice you want to make in the long term.
The STOP | DROP | SWAP approach from IBM gives you a holistic approach to move from proprietary, expensive software and over engineered single use systems to a hybrid multi-cloud model where open source and flexibility is baked in.
If you want to find out more about the benefits of LinuxONE click here.