Have you received a notice for an Oracle license audit, or run Oracle scripts? Our expertise can help you save 30% to 100% of your potentially claimed exposure.
Oracle License Management Services is the established authority on Oracle licensing policy. Their job is to validate the compliance position of your Oracle deployments, identify license violations and correct them by purchase of licenses where necessary.
A formal notice for an audit or a correspondence discussing the measurement of your deployment.
A declaration of usage by the customer through the update of an MS Excel spreadsheet.
Deploy tools to gather installation and usage data.
Analysis of the gathered usage data.
Inform you regarding the deployment & usage of audited products in your network.
In case of non-compliance, collaborate with the sales team internally within Oracle to submit a commercial proposal that will correct the license gap through a negotiated purchase.
Contact us at any stage of the engagement with Oracle.
Oracle audits can be formal, informal, or even casual. But they are not random. Below are some descriptions of Oracle license audits and their stages.
A seemingly friendly askAn Oracle salesperson asks about your architecture or deployment, or offers to advise you on your Oracle footprint. Most customers look up to Oracle salespersons as go-to sources for Oracle technical information, forgetting that his/her only job is to get revenue from their set of accounts. The sales reps are compensated for delivering against stiff sales targets. This financial incentive makes the conversation of an Oracle sales rep highly suspect.
An email or letter from Oracle's LMS teamYou might receive a note from Oracle's license management team stating that they would help you understand Oracle licensing. The acceptance of such an offer could lead to a detailed discussion that opens you to a more formal audit notice.
A formal notice for auditWhen a friendly discussion to purchase more licenses fails, it is customary for Oracle to send a formal notice for an audit. This has a contractual binding.
Oracle license audits are not random. The customers are targeted to get in more revenue. Some reasons for a potential license audit are:
We are firm believers in license compliance. But, equally, we are firm believers that a license audit should be investigated in detail, and not accepted without a complete understanding of your contractual rights and obligations.
We have also realized that Oracle, like many other publishers, makes a large number of mistakes when they report audit findings to customers.
Deployment assessmentWe conduct an audit of your deployed Oracle estate. The data gathering is comprehensive and gives information on the installation and usage of Oracle products and specific features. In case there is a report from Oracle, we compare our audit findings with those provided by Oracle for accuracy.
Contracts analysisWe study your contracts: the OMAs, OLSAs, ODs, email or letter correspondence to understand customer rights and obligations. Our experts will analyze the audit reports and contracts to understand the exact compliance gap, if any. Our experts understand the potential loopholes or mistakes in Oracle conducted audits.
Defense strategyWe will recommend the correct approach and strategy to counter Oracle's claims that may be incorrect. We will recommend the lowest possible bill of materials that you might need to purchase from Oracle to correct the non-compliance gaps.
Our expertise can help you save 30% to 100% of your potentially claimed exposure.
While Oracle has a very large number of products, their license management teams focus on a few product sets.
We provide a detailed discovery for Java and give customers a deployment dashboard of Java versions and JDKs from multiple publishers. This helps our customers decide on Java optimization and future decisions. Java Defense & Cost Reduction
The first 7 days and the next 30 days set the tone for the entire audit, so get them right.
Usually no. Your Oracle Master Agreement gives Oracle audit rights.
But you can heavily control how the audit unfolds: timing, scope, data format, who participates, what gets shared.
Most audit cost comes from giving Oracle more than the contract requires. We narrow the scope to what is contractually mandated and nothing more.
Common triggers include
Audits are rarely random. They are commercial events tied to compliance review.
All three feed the same outcome, which is pressure to buy. We respond carefully to each.
Only after we have reviewed what they collect, validated the output against your contracts, and prepared a response strategy. The scripts gather more data than most customers realize: feature usage, option triggers, multiplexing signals. Running them without preparation exposes you to findings that may not actually reflect contractual non-compliance.
In our experience, initial Oracle audit claims are inflated by 30% to 90%. In quite a few cases we have been able to reduce by 100%, i.e. not needing to pay Oracle any additional license fees.
The reductions come from challenging Oracle’s interpretation of your contract, disputing virtualization scope, correcting option-usage data, and pushing back on non-contractual policy documents. We negotiate the final outcome, not the initial claim.
Typical Oracle audits run 4 to 9 months from formal notice to commercial settlement. Some stretch to 12-18 months. The length is usually a function of how aggressively Oracle pushes and how prepared the customer is.
Yes. We routinely handle direct communication with Oracle LMS and Oracle’s audit team on behalf of our clients. Your name remains on the contract, but the day-to-day correspondence (data exchanges, meetings, follow-ups, negotiations) runs through our team. This removes pressure from your internal team and improves consistency.
Often yes. But this can be a very expensive proposition if done without having the best advice.
Oracle frequently prefers a forward-looking commercial outcome (OCI credits, new licenses, SaaS subscriptions) over a backward-looking penalty. Whether this is good for the customer depends entirely on whether the new spend reflects real future usage.
We model the alternatives before agreeing to any settlement structure.
Yes. Java audits follow a different playbook from Database audits: employee counts, deployment scope, contractor definitions, OpenJDK vs Oracle JDK identification. We have run dozens of Java audits and reviews, and clients have ranged from paying nothing to paying significantly less than Oracle’s opening number, with clean future positions.
Audit defence fees are a small fraction of the savings.
Across our engagements, the ROI ratio is typically 10x to 150x, meaning a client who pays us for audit defense saves 10 to 150 times that amount versus Oracle’s opening claim.
We size the opportunity before you commit so the business case is transparent.
We don’t disappear. We document the final position, update your effective license position, and flag the contractual changes Oracle introduced during settlement. We then recommend the controls (monitoring, governance, contract clauses) that prevent the same exposure from rebuilding silently in future.
Tell us what's on your desk: an audit letter, a request to run scripts, a claim. A senior advisor replies within 48 hours.
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At Oracle from 1998 to 2015, in leadership roles including Vice President Sales, and before that at Compaq and DEC. Amongst the foremost Oracle license experts globally.
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