David Woodard, Principal Architect
If you have regularly followed our blogs in the past, you will no doubt have read Nathan Biggs’ blog about the pending class-action lawsuit against Oracle Corporation. In that blog, Nathan notes that one of the claims about Oracle audits is that they are a sales activity, which House of Brick has experienced in their work supporting clients during audits as well. Oracle License Management Services (LMS) will continually maintain that they are separate from Oracle sales, and that audits have nothing to do with sales.
However, we recently came across a job posting in Denmark for an Oracle LMS consultant on the website Jobs DK, which shows this claim to be false. If for some reason the link is taken down, here’s a link to the same page on archive.org.
In the ‘Scope’ section of the job posting we see the statement:
“Works with Sales, Sales Management and other LMS teams”
If LMS were truly independent, then audit customers would be chosen by LMS which would produce their audit report, and send it to the customer and sales and be done with it. But as noted in the class action filing, Former Employee 1 (FE1) claims that “the sales teams and LMS closely coordinated”, which has been our experience at House of Brick.
Later in the job posting, we see the following in the ‘Responsibilities’ section:
“Builds relationship with sales and sales leaders in order to establish joint business plans on assigned territory, to increase the share of LMS and facilitate engagement progress.”
This statement clearly establishes the existence of a joint business plan with sales, and shows the close coordination between the two organizations.
Finally, in the ‘Accountabilities’ section we find the most incriminating statement:
“Meet LMS KPIs including but not limited to the generation of opportunities for License and Support Revenue”
The LMS consultant is expected to meet certain Key Performance Indicators for license and support revenue generation. This job posting describes an auditing group that not only has sales goals, but also incentives to make large non-compliance claims in order to meet those sales goals.
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again, if you are feeling intimidated by Oracle, let House of Brick help you. We have the experience and track record to ensure that you never pay more than is absolutely necessary in resolving your use of Oracle software products. We have your back!
