An audit letter, a renewal quote or a ULA end date on your desk? We check what Oracle, Microsoft, IBM or Broadcom is claiming, work out what you owe under your contract, defend against audits, and negotiate the rest down.
Independent licensing advisors since 2015: 260+ engagements, led by a former Oracle Vice President, with no fees from any software or AI vendor.
Advisor on Call, Guaranteed ULA Exits, Java Defense, Audit Defense, and a two-day licensing masterclass.
Enterprise AI contracts negotiated, right-sized and kept consumption-compliant.
License reviews, audit defense and renewal negotiation across the four riskiest publishers.
An Oracle expert on call by the hour. A ULA exit we guarantee for three years. A defense that closes Java demands on evidence, not payroll. An audit-defense that reduces your exposure by 30% to 100%. E-Business Suite and Fusion costs optimized, Oracle due diligence before an M&A deal closes, and support costs brought down. And a two-day masterclass that turns your own team into licensing experts.
ULA certification is the single highest-stakes event in Oracle licensing: one declaration fixes what you own forever. Most advisors help you prepare it and leave. We prepare it, defend it, and then guarantee it for three years.
Oracle's Java pricing quotes your whole payroll. We measure where Java actually runs, recommend remediation, provide contractual clarity, and reduce the demand on evidence, or eliminate the need for a deal entirely.
Uncontrolled license usage is a significant financial risk for E-Business Suite organizations, and Fusion subscriptions are set by what you commit to at each renewal. We count users and modules the way your contract does, check the technology underneath, and right-size support and subscriptions.
Oracle audits can be formal, informal, or even casual, but they are not random. We test Oracle's findings against your deployment and your contracts, recommend the lowest bill of materials for any real gap, and negotiate the final outcome, not the initial claim.
Managing Partner of Rythium Technologies. A former Oracle Vice-President (1998 to 2015) who now sits on the buyer's side, and author of “Licensing Oracle” (Notion Press, 2021) (ISBN 10: 1639046887).
Enterprise AI agreements combine the worst of software licensing (opaque pricing, lock-in, usage metering) with brand-new problems like token commits, model deprecation and data rights.
Every task runs on the priciest model, even ones a model 90% cheaper handles.
Agents work for hours on their own, with no spend limit and no one owning the tab.
Spend shows up as one lump sum, never per team or task, so the waste stays hidden.
Heavy usage gets praised as “adoption”, so teams burn more instead of doing more.
Commercial terms for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and other frontier vendors: pricing benchmarks, discount structures, rate-lock and price-protection clauses, renewal caps.
Seat vs. token vs. hybrid: modeling your real usage before you sign, so you don't buy a three-year commit for a six-month pilot.
Ongoing monitoring of usage against contract commits, overage exposure alerts, true-up preparation and chargeback models for internal teams.
Copilot, Einstein, Joule, Firefly, Oracle AI agents: every application vendor is attaching AI SKUs to renewals. We separate what you'll use from what they're bundling.
Training-data carve-outs, IP indemnity, output ownership, model-deprecation and migration clauses, regional data-residency terms, reviewed before signature, not after an incident.
Independent, like-for-like comparison of model providers and AI platforms on cost per outcome, because we don't earn a rupee from any of them.
We build your Effective License Position, defend it in audits, and use it as leverage at renewal. Publisher by publisher, product by product. Microsoft, Oracle, Broadcom/VMware, IBM, Red Hat, Adobe, etc.
Resellers earn margin when you buy more. Publisher partners protect their certification status. Rythium's only revenue is the fee you pay us, so the only outcome we're rewarded for is the one that's good for you.
Names withheld under NDA; the numbers are real.
Licensing tactics, audit defense and AI contract breakdowns, in plain language, every week.
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The Java Tax: Why Oracle’s New Pricing is Costing You MillionsRythium does two things: defend you against publisher license demands, and negotiate contracts, so you pay less and secure the strongest commercial terms. Across Oracle, Microsoft, IBM & Red Hat, Broadcom/VMware, and enterprise AI contracts with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google & embedded AI.
No. Rythium holds no reseller agreements, partner certifications or referral arrangements with any software publisher or AI vendor. Our only revenue is professional fees paid by clients. That independence is the product: it's why our advice can be honest.
Our customers span both ends of the spectrum in size and type:
It depends on deployment trajectory. If growth in ULA-covered products has flattened, certification usually wins: you keep perpetual rights to everything deployed and stop paying for headroom you won't use. If genuine growth is ahead, a renegotiated ULA can make sense. The mistake is letting Oracle's renewal deadline make the decision for you.
On Oracle, our customers get between 30% to 100% reduction in their Oracle exposure or the quoted Oracle prices. On Microsoft Enterprise Agreements, our customers get between 5% to 30% reductions. On Microsoft SQL Server deployments, customers can get between 5% to 50% reductions.
Three ways. Pricing is consumption-based and volatile, so commit sizing matters more than discount percentage. The product changes under you: models get deprecated mid-contract, so you need migration and price-protection clauses. And data terms (training rights, output ownership, indemnity) carry risk that never existed in a perpetual license. The negotiation muscles are the same; the contract anatomy is new.
There are two things that we guarantee. The first is the certification itself: if Oracle challenges the certification position and demands an audit, we defend it and get you the deployed quantities as your perpetual grant. The second is that we work with you to optimize your post-certification deployments, and if Oracle institutes an audit during the next three years, we defend you. This is possible because we do the certification work thoroughly enough to put our own name on it; the scope and conditions are set out plainly in the engagement letter before we start.
You buy a block of 20 or 40 hours. Half are face-to-face advisory sessions with our Managing Partner, a former Oracle Vice-President, and the other half are back-end analysis hours our licensing team spends on your contracts, deployment data and quotes, so every session is grounded in your numbers rather than general opinion. Hours draw down as you use them and stay valid for 6 to 12 months as mutually agreed.
We have two types of charging mechanisms. Fixed-fee engagements for reviews, audits and ULA certifications, scoped upfront. For negotiations, we charge a percentage of the savings achieved (plus an initial token fee that is adjusted against the final fee). No savings, no fees.
Java deployment discovery across servers and endpoints, classification into Oracle commercial, Oracle non-commercial, OpenJDK and third-party distributions, normalization against your existing Oracle and third-party entitlements, license requirement determination, remediation and rebalancing recommendations, and direct support during any negotiation or audit with Oracle. Start to finish, not just a report.
Send it over. A senior advisor, not a sales rep, will tell you within 48 hours whether there's money on the table.
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