CASE STUDY | Oracle Unlimited License Agreements

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Volume-based Negotiations of Unlimited License Agreements with Oracle

Opportunity

RFD & Associates, Inc. (RFD) has worked with large agencies and enterprise level customers that require multiple processors of multiple Oracle products to expand and scale existing environments, as well as implement new projects. When a large volume of Oracle licenses are required, the solution can very quickly become cost prohibitive.

Solution

In these instances, RFD has worked with customers to secure heavily discounted, volumebased unlimited licensing, known as an Unlimited License Agreement (ULA). Since 2010 RFD has worked with several different customers to negotiate and transact over 10 separate ULAs with Oracle. ULAs are contractually negotiated sets of Oracle products established as software eligible for a customer’s unlimited deployment over an agreed contract term. Specifically, ULAs are beneficial to customers for the following reasons:

  • Provide a significant cost savings vs. a quantity buy
  • Allow for significant growth expansion on all customer key projects and existing environments with no “true-up” or cost increase at the end of the ULA contract term
  • Consolidate customer licenses into a single support stream

To secure these ULA transaction discounts, RFD worked closely with the customer and Oracle to determine the client’s Oracle need over the proposed contract term (often 2, 3 or 5 years). To do this, RFD worked with technology and business sections within the agency to determine expansion and new project road maps in the near term to ultimately determine the number of licenses needed of each Oracle product. Once the license count basis and growth rate was determined, RFD worked with Oracle on the customer’s behalf to negotiate an aggressive discount for the ULA transaction.

Results

In all ULA transactions RFD successfully saved each customer between $8,000,000 and $25,000,000 versus a quantity buy of the same products at the DIR standard discount and was able to:

  • Consolidate existing Oracle support contracts into a single support stream
  • Negotiate a 0% support increase over the life of the ULA term
  • Decrease the cost of existing support (in most cases)

With ULAs, RFD has helped customers solve deployment problems by procuring large amounts of world-class Oracle products and solutions at an aggressive discount with unlimited deployment capability.

In August 2017, TEC contracted with RFD to provide Modification and Maintenance Services for the Electronic Filing Application. Included in this contract is the exclusive rights for RFD to proliferate the application to TEC-authorized Texas City and County Governments.