Oracle Licensing Baseline Service

Oracle licensing is complex. To get a complete understanding of your licensing position you need an accurate, complete and up-to-date view of your Oracle software deployment, coupled with independent and confidential expert license analysis. The Oracle Licensing Baseline Service provides you with the data and expertise you need to rapidly achieve this. The combination of Baseline License Management from b.lay, coupled with iQSonar of iQuate delivers a service designed to ensure peace of mind. Combining tools and knowledge.

Click here for more information about the service.

about iQuate:

iQuate is a privately owned company established in 2002, with its HQ in Dublin, Ireland.  iQuate developed iQSonar a complete and accurate inventory technology. This technology delivers complete, continual and accurate visibility of highly complex physical, virtual and cloud environments. iQSonar is the first tool to be verified by Oracle’s License Management Services team as providing data which Oracle will accept as an alternative to Oracle’s own LMS measurement tools. Their verifiably accurate inventory improves the critical business decisions that control costs and mitigate risks for organizations, such as Barclays, BT and PWC. For more information www.iquate.com.

Both Vijfhart as b.lay aim to provide training to Oracle Professionals. By broaden the Vijfhart portfolio and to fulfill their demand for more Oracle Licensing training both parties seized the opportunity to jointly offer  b.lay’s Oracle License Management Services recognized Licensing Training.

When talking about Oracle, most people fail to fully comprehend the product and licensing diversity and the opportunities it offers. With this training Oracle Technical Professionals will be given an overview of the Oracle product strategy and portfolio as the type of product and its place in the IT architecture are closely related to the licensing of that product and the price. Understanding what to license and how empowers you to better build and recommend architectures.

From experience we have learned that if Oracle Technical Professionals are aware of the logic behind Oracle licensing they will be able to provide significant additional added value to their companies. Judging the impact their choices in the daily operations, enables the Oracle Technical Professional to be clear to their organization about financial consequences and risks.

Click here for more information about the Oracle License Training or click here to register to the training

about Vijfhart:

Originally Oracle software Training is their specialty. Over the years they have become one of the leading IT Trainers in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, their expertise extends far beyond Oracle with an assortment consisting of training in the areas of: Oracle, Java, Microsoft, Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Internet, Linux, SOA, XML, etc..

Vijhart stand for:  flexibility, responsiveness and independence in a flat organizational structure. This makes being flexible possible. Their approach is personal and professional.

“With the methodological expertise we received from b.lay we were able to deliver in house a service we previously would have had to outsource or invest in major resources. We saved time and money. B-lay enabled us to provide the service our clients were demanding”.

- Hans Vandeweijer, Manager Contract Risk & Compliance, Deloitte

about Deloitte:

Deloitte is the leading audit and consulting practices in Belgium. More than 2,400 people in 12 offices across the country serve public and private enterprises with financial, legal, tax, management and information technology expertise. We maintain our leadership position by continuing to make a difference to our clients, our people and the wider community.

Audit & enterprise risk services: Audit. Assure. Advice.

The global economy and today’s complex and dynamic environment more than ever require accurate financial information and trusted advisors.Companies and governments rely on Deloitte for a wide range of audit, risk management and advisory services. These services are delivered by people who know how to bundle complex skills to provide confidence to the capital markets and value to our clients. Deloitte is the market leader in Belgium for Audit & Enterprise Risk Services, serving about one out of four Belgian quoted companies. The practice counts more than 600 dedicated client service professionals who provide a full range of services to Belgian as well as international clients.

case details:

• what? b.lay provided Deloitte with the Oracle knowledge backbone neccesary to extend the license compliance / management services of Deloitte.
• why? Increase the services Deloitte can offer to their existing and new customers.
• benefits? In a rapid and agile manner Deloitte were able to incorporate the Oracle knowledge backbone to meet the business objective of becoming an independent Oracle License Consulting Service

“The practical training b.lay delivered brought our team up to speed on Oracle licensing in a single day. Our 14 EMEA risk and compliance managers took away a detailed overview of Oracle licensing as well as many real world examples which has enabled us to engage our clients in a far more detailed way and helped to create new consulting opportunities”.

- Jan Corstens, Partner Contract Risk & Compliance, Deloitte

Deloitte is the leading audit and consulting practices in Belgium. More than 2,400 people in 12 offices across the country serve public and private enterprises with financial, legal, tax, management and information technology expertise. We maintain our leadership position by continuing to make a difference to our clients, our people and the wider community.

Audit & enterprise risk services: Audit. Assure. Advice.The global economy and today’s complex and dynamic environment more than ever require accurate financial information and trusted advisors. Companies and governments rely on Deloitte for a wide range of audit, risk management and advisory services. These services are delivered by people who know how to bundle complex skills to provide confidence to the capital markets and value to our clients. Deloitte is the market leader in Belgium for Audit & Enterprise Risk Services, serving about one out of four Belgian quoted companies. The practice counts more than 600 dedicated client service professionals who provide a full range of services to Belgian as well as international clients.

case details:

• what? b.lay provided Deloitte with our sophisticated Oracle Training to extend the license compliance / management services of Deloitte.
• why? Increase knowledge of Oracle Licensing for Deloitte to address their existing and new customers.
• benefits? By understanding the logic behind Oracle licensing, Deloitte is able to support their customers and generate new opportunities.

“We decided to use Zyncc to meet the growing demand of our business, reduce cycle time and allow us to perform more engagements with the same resources”

- Christina Crowley, VP Oracle Global LMS

General growth and demand from our partner community meant that we needed an innovative and reliable way to create efficiencies in our process.  Zyncc reduced our review cycle time by 35% across our partner community.  This resulted in significant budgetary savings and higher returns on investment.  By freeing up additional resources with the time saved, we were able to service more partners to improve our channel capacity and output.

Zyncc is now at the forefront as new opportunities arise within LMS.  In the past, projects may have been put on hold due to resource or travel constraints.  However, with the use of zyncc, LMS has the ability to link directly with partners in an effort to share data and exchange information.

Oracle’s Global License Management Services is an organization that assists customers and partners in managing the use and distribution of Oracle products.  Its goal is to provide Oracle users and distributors with the most up-to-date knowledge, best practices and tools to manage and maximize their Oracle license investment.

B.lay hosts a customized application for LMS which provides a communication platform to extend the existing partner compliance program.  The application, Zyncc, enables an online, self service program for the Oracle partner community.  Through the use of an online partner portal, b.lay expanded LMS’ reach within the partner community.  LMS is in a better position to service all partners.

Why did LMS want this?

Oracle zyncc provides a mechanism for LMS to remotely execute business reviews of partners, across various countries simultaneously and ultimately decrease the time spent performing LMS engagements.

What were the benefits?

Zyncc provides a single, secure platform where partners can exchange data with Oracle.  LMS will use Zyncc as a data respository when reviewing application descriptions, spreadsheets and technical output logs.  The portal is simple to use, flexible and user-friendly.  It has various functionalities to enhance the communication with Oracle Partners through interactive “chat” and links to licensing and pricing trainings.

The largest benefit realized during the work performed was a decrease in the time it took to complete a partner review engagement.  In the pilot program, the process cycle time decreased by 35%.  This will allow us to increase the number of partner engagements LMS performs each year.  In addition, the feedback we received from participants in the engagement process was very positive as it provided a one-stop shop for their questions and made the process more transparent and easy to administer.

B-lay and Emerset have merged Clear Licensing ® and Baseline License Management Methodology to change the world  of Microsoft license administration.

This allows us to offer our customers a wider range of high quality services. With these expanded services next to Oracle and Adobe, we will also be able to provide the facts around Microsoft licensing.

What does that mean for you?

• We help you evaluate your specific Microsoft environment from a financial point of view and from a technological stand point. Resulting in a comprehensive licensing report stating current installed software vs. purchased assets.
• We can perform an in-depth analysis of the financial and business advantages of your Microsoft agreements. The deliverable is a 3-6 year financial analysis. This outlines the various licensing options available and the ramifications of each option (Technology projects, financials and agreements).

Learn more about the results of our work.

• Banking Case Study
• Health Care Case Study

Agreement Background:

The customer has been party to an Enterprise Agreement Subscription (EAS) from 2002 starting off initially with only the basic platform products (Office, Windows O/S upg & Core Cal previously known as BackOffice Cal), subsequently since then additional products were introduced to the organisation changing the entire scope and importance of the ESA.

In 2008 the agreement was up for renewal and the customer wished to evaluate the options Microsoft presented both from a financial point of view and from a technological stand point.

Download The Case Study in PDF Format

Our baseline license management partner Emerset provides a case study on Microsoft in the Health Care Industry.

Background:

Over the past decade, the client has purchased all licensing through a Select Agreement as part of a long term strategic decision to work with Microsoft as a strategic vendor and to implement a wide range of Microsoft technologies over a 6-year period. The client has decided to perform an in-depth analysis of the financial and business advantages of an Enterprise Agreement.

• Annual Revenue: £1 billion
• Employees: 15,000
• PCs: 15,000 +

Download The Case Study in PDF Format

So if we say we think it is important to provide transparency to the ecosystem we move in, we also need to demonstrate it to help educate you…

An  important part of b.lay’s core values is that we believe in keeping things simple. It is a basic yet beautiful challenge.  If we want our community to embrace this core value, what is the best way to do it? How do we spread the message?

We therefore decided to start addressing one of the core elements of making and keeping things simple; education.

You can educate people in many ways, and with todays advanced technologies on the web or on devices it seems to be more about the transport of delivery than the message itself. Our experience is that learning on the job, within your own work environment and addressing topics relevant to you works best. Understanding all the rules from all software vendors or even 10 rules from one vendor is not feasible and not even desirable. We believe seeing the logic behind the licensing, how the complexity has grown over the years and knowing where to find the right sources when you need them is the only way to simplicity.

And to keep it simple it is best to call us, explain your need, and we will configure a suitable training to your need for you to get educated.

Available Oracle trainings:

• Oracle licensing made clear: 2 days.
• The insights of Oracle licensing: 3-4 days.

Do you want to b_updated on new training offerings please subscribe here.

Whatever your perspective we invite you to review the findings in our latest document “Communication Pitfalls – Bridging the gap is the key to stopping IT polarization”

Software Asset Management is a well developed and mature industry. There is an ISO standard, hundreds of tools and thousands of consultants devoted to SAM and yet many people are sceptical about the efficiency and value of traditional Software Asset Management? The ideas are compelling but perhaps the experience and the delivery has been less satisfactory.

We at b.lay decided to review the 5 most frequently raised issues and the subsequent results that we encounter in our engagements with software licensees. We decided to consolidate their experiences into a discussion document and look at ways that these issues can be addressed.

You can download the document “Communication Pitfalls – Bridging the gap is the key to stopping IT polarization”.

If you recognize the issues or wish to comment on the findings please join the debate and leave a reply below.

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With ever tightening budgets and governance; with software vendors seeking to protect intellectual property rights, those responsible for spending and protecting public money face a continuous challenge.

b.lay helps. contact us or read our ‘Public Sector’ whitepaper

b.lay has helped many Government organisations gain control of their  licence administration which has enabled them to maximise the value of their investments and protect against compliance related issues. But, even more importantly, understanding how this works has enabled  better decision making. Often resulting in an architecture fit for the future, at equal or lower cost.

We also provide an adaptable methodology for the administration of software assets. The aim of this is to turn short term improvements into long term benefits that remain with your organisation helping to consolidate the efficiencies and improve the way you work.

If you hold any of these IT responsibilities you should talk to b.lay:

• Providing better value for money
• Protecing against costly audits
• Take advantage of previously underused IT assets
• Reduce spending on unnecessary maintenance and upgrades

If you want to know the facts about the use of software licenses, b.lay can give you the insight into your software license and contract administration that you require. We can help you identify opportunities to discover and exploit.

b.lay helps: contact us or read our ‘Public Sector’ whitepaper

Other available resources:

• Zyncc
• baseline license management
• whitepaper Delivering on the Theory: Reassessing the value of Software Asset Management to a sceptical world.

Check out how Zyncc can help you…

In the last few years the market has developed several standards around managing your licenses and review processes. We, at b.lay aim ‘to make the complex, simple’. We strongly believe in efficiency and that a customer should have a clear understanding of what needs to be executed in order to achieve  practical results.

Our philosphy is supported by the development of our solution Zyncc. This solution helps you to collect relevant data and communicate with the people responsible for it inside or outside of your organization. In our many years experience doing reviews we continuously had to deal our clients internal communication challenges. Our smart assessment modules are focussed on helping you capture data for multiple software vendors and translating it into easy to understand and relevant information.

Zyncc functionality provides a combination of addressing the right people and asking the key questions in a smart way whilst allowing you to simplify the data gathering within your company. We streamline the communication and synchronize the data flow for all involved. This optimizes interaction flows and combines it with the population of a central repository in a structured way supporting the entire data gathering and interpretation cycle helping you to become efficient.

Let us highlight the key benefits of Zyncc:

# Efficient Process

• Your environment will be assessed by a trusted partner with the help of our first class solutions and license experts
• We provide Transparency by knowing each step of the process
• The process and content can be geared to support existing processes or tools.
• You are in control

# Smart Data Gathering

• Use of intelligent setup assessments in order to question your organization.
• Easy to combine with discovery software by finding relevant data
• Retrieve a complete license and deployment picture per software vendor
• Data gathering is done with the highest standards and through non-intrusive processes

# Reliable Fact based Reporting

• Insight into what you own by gathering contractual software agreements and license records centrally and/or by requesting from distributed sources
• Know what you are entitled to use by translating your acquired licenses into your ‘right to use’
• Relate the results of Smart Data Gathering to your entitlements in the optimal way
• Deliver a reliable fact based report to provide to a software publisher in advance

# Financial

• Have appropriate controls for internal cross charges
• Be ahead of the vendor: negate the internal audit cost
• Demonstrable cost prevention: reorganize your allocation to match entitlement

We deliver Zyncc as a white-label and in the future will launch our own brand ‘your zyncc’.

Contact us for more information or register here for us to update you.

“To maximize the cost efficiencies of nowadays IT infrastructures we believe companies like b.lay are vital to empower you with control and insight”

- Ton Arrachart, Staff Manager Information Technology at Van Oord

The IT industry is characterized by a large number of software suppliers/distributors and wide variety of products and services. In software licensing, and especially enterprise software licensing, all IT choices are vital; hardware, infrastructure and project demands. Further technological enhancements happen on an ongoing bases. This makes software licensing complex and treacherous and establishing continuous software compliance near to impossible.

Companies like b.lay are vitial to ensure we keep control and insight, especially when IT is not your companies core business. The insight they provide allows us to keep cost efficient, but also creates the business case to use today’s technology in an effective manner.

About Van Oord:
Van Oord is a Dutch based world-wide operating dredging, marine and offshore contractor. Van Oord has realised many infrastructural projects throughout the world like the artificial islands Palm Jumeirah and The World in Dubai. The company is a partner in the construction of Maasvlakte 2, the Rotterdam port expansion project in the Netherlands. For more information www.vanoord.com.

The name: Lictionary, your online License dictionary

After testing many of storage models it turned out no existing repository model could store data the way we would like. Especially not if you want to keep relational structures to create rules and scenarios and store timelines. This led us to build entire new software with the help of fantastic business partners. We call it a cross over between a relational database and wikipedia. This software is unique in simplicity and has already surprised people involved in the project.

Lictionary will not be on the market until early 2011, but we are starting to use it internally and are looking for people that would like to be part of this early phase of exploration and beta testing that should take place in the last quarter of 2010. So, if you are interested, let us know at info@lictionary.info.

Follow the progress on twitter

“We decided to use b.lay as our Oracle knowledge backbone as we recognised the importance of having high level expertise. It would have taken us years to acquire the skills required to provide our Oracle services to the level we provide our Microsoft services.”

- Daryl Ullman, Founder Emerset

case details:

• what? b.lay provided Emerset with the Oracle knowledge backbone neccesary to extend the license compliance / management services of Emerset.
• why? Increase the services Emerset can offer to their existing and new customers.
• benefits? In a rapid and agile manner Emerset were able to incorporate the Oracle knowledge backbone to meet the business objective of becoming an independent Oracle License Consulting Service

Emerset about b.lay:

“We decided to use b.lay as our Oracle knowledge backbone as we recognised the importance of having high level expertise. It would have taken us years to acquire the skills required to provide our Oracle services to the level we provide our Microsoft services. With the help of b.lay, sometimes with hands on involvement, we were trained on the job in Oracle and now deliver a high quality service. Over the few last months we have worked on various large customers together. The simplification of the complexity and the precision of their work allowed us to help our customers move forward.”
- Daryl Ullman, Founder Emerset, Managing Consultant

In several places on this website you read about us talking about Zyncc.

Zyncc is our upcoming product range and here at b.lay HQ we are trying hard to contain our excitement about it. It has been in development for a couple of years now and soon we will be unleashing its power upon the software world.

Zyncc is a business utility that provides software vendors, end users and service providers a means of communication that focuses on optimizing the value of information relating to licensing within the supplier – end user supply chain. In other words tapping into the unique business intelligence this can provide.

When we started on the path to this product development we were looking at specific benefits like consolidating an optimized upgrade path’s and perhaps a migration to a volume licensing program. But we soon realised that there’s potentially far more to be made of this solution.

Look out for Zyncc in the next few months.

b.lay will share their solution with you in the next generation of Zyncc.

Being sharp and staying up to date in the digital world is a minimum prerequisite for the continuity of your business.

Keeping track of products, services, IP, licensing, maintenance upgrade paths and related rules are a challenge for your internal team, your partners and your customers.

For a supplier this means you are unable to access seemingly obvious means of creating value added opportunities with your customers and for your customers difficulties accessing complex data from multiple and frequently changing sources mean that they experience negative perception and are less inclined to make positive buying decisions in favour of your products or services.

b.lay Zyncc technology creates clear product structures associated with the appropriate licensing rules and applies them to your customer’s usage, deployment and entitlement.

As a result Zyncc technology opens up multiple levels of previously inaccessible Business Intelligence about your customers. Open your eyes to the opportunity.

To learn more about Zyncc or to enquire about our beta testing program please contact b.lay on…..

info@b-lay.com

Or call us on +31 30 320 0140

Their new Zyncc allows end-users to assess their compliance at their own time, by themselves, using an online methodology and support; Synchronizing vendor and customer.
We wish them all the best with their pilot over the next few months and are anxious to see their customer’s feedback.