NAMED USER licensing in a CONCURRENT user world

Eric Lehti

VIP Member
How do you on NAMED USER licensing monitor yourselves to comply with your user license count? Anything on your system to keep you in compliance?
Menu G943 Software License Manager was designed for the Concurrent User model.
 
This does not address the NAMED User issue.

Menu G943 option 2 (J98805) shows Active Users and Maximum Users Allowed (NAMED users).
 
This does not address the NAMED User issue.

Menu G943 option 3 (J98806) will display the maximum user count reached
 
Over a year ago, we were "forced" to convert all our current licensing from our "concurrent" model to named users. After asking lots of questions of Oracle people, it was clear that what all of us World folks thought was a "tool for compliance" (that being the Software License Manager) is useless. In fact it was even useless in the Concurrent model before we converted. Why? I have no idea other than when the Oracle Auditors came, I promptly gave them all the reports and counts and even reports from the SLM that clearly showed we never exceeded our license count any given day for many years. That means nothing to them. They run lots audit jobs over lots of transaction files and come up with their own number of users that you "really" have and tell you that a bill will be coming for the additional users. Huh?

In my case, I have multiple environments and a few users that even cross these environments (which is fine and they don't count those twice as long as they know). In the end, I now maintain an Excel spreadsheet that I update as users come and go and it gives me an actual account to compare with what we have for licensing. When the auditors come next time, I should just be able to pull it out and hopefully no surprises. I asked the auditors how other shops keep track of things since Oracle provides no tool, and they just shrugged. "Not our problem" is what I was hearing. If any of you current World shops have NOT been audited, be prepared to pay. You can no longer buy any more concurrent user licenses. If they deem you are out of compliance (which they will), you will be forced to convert all current licenses to named licenses, and then buy more named licenses to bring you up to their compliance number. Cha-Ching!

For more of my blathering on this topic, I think I ranted in a post in here on this same topic last year. Good Luck!
 
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