This Livingstone Group client is a major North American telecommunications organization, and is the parent company to many large multi-media businesses and thousands of smaller subsidiaries. This conglomerate owns organizations across the US and Europe, with hundreds of thousands of employees working across different divisions.
This Telecoms giant was recommended Livingstone’s services by a subsidiary that had achieved fantastic results from a successful Oracle ULA (Unlimited License Agreement) optimization project that it had undertaken, which was also a long-standing client of Livingstone and at the time was being acquired. The telecoms organization was looking to end its current ULA agreements that it had scattered across its various subsidiaries and instead consolidate all of its ULAs into one agreement, contractually and technically.
As is the case with many Oracle customers, this client felt that it didn’t have an adequate understanding or the experience in-house to effectively renegotiate the contract terms to achieve the optimized outcome and new agreement it was looking for. Along with the subsidiary’s recommendation, the client knew it was in safe hands and could achieve its desired outcome thanks to Livingstone’s deep expert insights and years of experience negotiating contracts with Oracle. With senior stakeholder support, Livingstone’s team of experts got to work.
Assessing a vast estate in a short window of time
The first challenge the Livingstone team had to undertake was assessing and certifying the organization’s complex Oracle estate. This was an enormous task as hundreds of Oracle products, including business critical applications that spanned the thousands of subsidiaries, needed to be measured and certified. The amount of data the team had to process was vast, further complicated by the fact that each subsidiary had its own ITAM processes and tools in place.
The client’s IT and procurement teams had also never undertaken such a huge project before, and with technical teams siloed and scattered across the organization, it was Livingstone’s task to bring all of these teams together to provide an effective structure and process in order to achieve the desired outcome.
An additional challenge for the Livingstone team was that this certification process needed to be completed within just two weeks, ahead of the ULA contract renewal date. Along with these time constraints, Livingstone and the organization were also at an impasse with Oracle, who was pushing for the organization to sign up a new ULA.
Automated tool and stakeholder support key to success
To tackle the vast amounts of data that needed to be certified, Livingstone implemented a variety of complex tools, including its own carefully developed automated solution, the ‘Oracle Capacity Planning Workbook’. This tool was able to capture and assess the relevant information Livingstone needed to optimize the client’s Oracle estate. In addition, the tool was able to review the data collected by other ITAM tools being used by the client’s subsidiaries, including Oracle’s own measurement methodology output. Livingstone’s proprietary technology was able to accommodate and review the data output of these tools and methodologies, along with a manual assessment for products which could not be measured by ITAM tools, the Livingstone team was able to gain a clear view of the client’s current Oracle estate.
Meanwhile, Livingstone also worked closely with the client to form its Oracle Bill of Materials (BOM), detailing the products and terms it would like to see in its new Oracle contract. This included usage rights for its desired products across the organization as a whole, and allowing Oracle products to be used on approved cloud platforms.
Key to acquiring this information and to the success of the entire project was the input and support of stakeholders from across the board. To provide guidance on how to manage communication with Oracle and further stakeholders’ understanding of the vendor, Livingstone organized stakeholder management workshops and created an extensive Oracle playbook to educate the teams involved. These offerings were very well-received and the close relationship Livingstone developed with senior stakeholders in particular helped streamline Livingstone’s processes.
With the BOM in hand, and with a thorough knowledge of the client’s current Oracle standing, Livingstone was able to calculate the client’s usage requirements and formalized a checklist that the client could present to Oracle.
Securing a ‘TULA’
The result was that the client signed up to a new and one-of-a-kind agreement with Oracle – a Term Unlimited License Agreement (TULA). Under this unique agreement, the organization was granted unlimited deployment for a three-year period, but a key element of the TULA was for the organization not only being able to achieve everything on its checklist, but also massively reducing its support costs over the three-year term, but more importantly reducing support costs and at the end of the agreement.
The three major contractual successes secured for the organization were securing usage rights across the organization and its subsidiaries, in a consolidated contract; vast reductions in support costs; and cloud usage rights for its Oracle products, which the organization was able to deploy on a private cloud platform, with its rights no longer limited to on-premise.
Huge cost-savings & future projects
The client achieved huge cost-savings as a result of this new contract, thanks to the reduced support stream costs and optimized product requirements. Considering the scale of the agreement, which included hundreds of products spanning the organization’s many subsidiaries, it was an outstanding achievement.
Due to the success of the engagement, Livingstone will lead an Oracle managed service that will oversee the TULA agreement term. This is crucial to ensuring the client adheres to the terms agreed in the contract, including support with tooling, measuring usage effectively, advisory help, and managing the support stream at the end of the agreement, for example, when reduction in support has been achieved. In addition, Livingstone has been working on a smaller project with a subsidiary of the organization, which, as part of a new agreement, had a separate Oracle middleware ULA. Livingstone Group has helped this subsidiary to certify and optimize this ULA.