Oracle was called out for its poor cloud service licensing practices
Oracle should review its cloud service licensing practices or risk alienating customers according to the Campaign for Clear Licensing (CCL), an independent not-for-profit organisation campaigning for the rights of business software buyers.
In an open letter to Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison and the board of directors, Martin Thompson, CCL’s founder and chair hit out at the company’s licensing practices and argued that it needs to make “significant changes” to how it approaches cloud service licensing in particular.
“Not least of all is overcoming the deep-rooted mistrust of your core customer base as a result of your auditing and licensing practices. We fear that if Oracle does not address these concerns then the company’s ability to meet its stated $1 billion cloud sales target next year, together with the longer term outlook for its cloud computing business, will remain in doubt,” he wrote.
Oracle has not returned requests for comment by the time this article was published.
Thompson alluded to a survey of Oracle customers CCL published last November which suggested Oracle’s audit requests are found by most to be unclear and difficult to respond to; that its license management services are unhelpful to customers; and that licensing changes are often poorly communicated to customers.
He said while Oracle should be applauded for increasing its level of engagement in a bid to address these issues, more needs to be done.
“Together these issues have resulted in customer relationships that are predominantly hostile and filled with deep-rooted mistrust, particularly when it comes to licensing and audits. We strongly believe that failing to address these concerns will hamper Oracle’s ability to persuade its customers to adopt its cloud computing services, as most are concerned that cloud computing services will lock them into Oracle even more than they already are.”
This isn’t the first time Oracle has been singled out for its licensing practices – nor is it the first traditional IT software provider struggling to change its licensing practices and make them more cloud friendly. Others to have been called out in the past include Microsoft and SAP.
