I cry and I cry: How not to overpay for licenses for a DBMS?

If you ask your friend to name the most innovative companies, he will surely mention Apple and is unlikely to include it in his Porsche list. Although this car manufacturer has adopted the same strategy as Apple: investing profits from traditional products in innovation and transforming business.

Apple directed sales of its popular Mac computers to new product development, and as a result, iPhone, which now brings the company the most profit, has entered the market. Porsche, whose main business has been associated with expensive sports cars for many years, decided to invest its revenues in creating its own crossovers when they became fashionable. Released in 2002, the Cayenne, along with the more compact Macan, became the company's bestsellers, and in 2015 Porsche sold crossovers twice as much as the sports cars of the famous 911 series. and due to this, from a manufacturer specializing in sports cars, the company has transformed into a supplier of powerful luxury crossovers.

This strategy can be applied by any other company that wants to accelerate the introduction of innovations. Unique applications and products that competitors cannot offer will ensure success in the market, but their development and promotion require significant investments. Many companies can not invest in investments due to the fact that the bulk of their expenses goes to the maintenance of core business processes.
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Necessary processes and unjustified expenses

The main business processes depend on the industry and the functions of the company, but for all modern companies, their basis is the database and the database management system (DBMS) that serves it.

At the same time, the use of a DBMS is costly. As private and hybrid clouds are introduced in many companies, the total IT budget increases the share of licensing and database support costs, and the database support and maintenance costs increase every year, so financial directors are paying more and more attention to this budget item.

In addition, when purchasing a DBMS license, the price is calculated based on the number of processor cores installed in the server, although only some of them can be used to maintain the DBMS. The IT industry is currently evolving towards software-defined data centers (SDDC) and hyperconvergent systems that provide consolidation of multiple applications on a single physical server. As a result of the widespread introduction of virtualization, many companies use only a fraction of the processor power of their servers to maintain the DBMS, but they have to pay as if they used this power completely and still buy additional hardware to run the workloads.

As a result, there is a gap between the cost of the database and the effect of its use, and there is no money left in the IT budget that could be spent on innovation.

Solution: flexible licensing

As we can see, the traditional method of licensing DBMSs is poorly suited for a modern company, which is why a new flexible licensing model is becoming popular, taking into account the current realities of database consolidation.

A flexible licensing model is more profitable for many companies, because when using it, they do not need to buy software for a specific hardware configuration. They can simply license the database software for actual use and then gradually scale this software, which allows you to completely abstract the application from the hardware platform on which it runs. Using this model, enterprises can maximize the cost of virtualization. Instead of licensing the full capacity of the server, processor power is licensed only for a specific virtual machine. And this is regardless of how many of these resources are needed for the database.

With flexible licensing, a company does not have to pay for all the processor resources of the server, but only for the cores that are actually used. This advantage is especially important when deploying a database in a private or hybrid cloud.

A flexible licensing model is very beneficial for many companies, including:

• Enterprises whose business involves intensive data processing, especially from the financial services, retail, healthcare, payment systems and industrial production sectors;
• Enterprises that want to migrate their relational DBMS (RDBMS) to the cloud and abandon the current infrastructure, which requires high costs;
• Enterprises that want to reduce the total cost of running business-critical applications, implement resilient capacity expansion and ensure the integrity of the code and algorithms of these applications;
• Enterprises that want to save significantly on CapEx and OpEx and significantly reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO);
• Enterprises with data storage and data storage applications
• Enterprises requiring high-availability clustered applications
• Businesses requiring high security database encryption
• Businesses that need to use strong database encryption
• Companies that need a database with support for the active standby or passive standby backup function

With a flexible licensing model, the main advantage is the ability to get the same functions of legacy DBMS at a better price. Saved money to support the main business processes, the company can invest in projects for innovation, which will create new sources of profit.

DBMS Payment Options - Executive Summary

Different DBMS licensing scheme may be very different. When analyzing options, three recommendations should be considered:

1) Carefully review the licensing model and potential hidden costs (for example, the need to purchase additional equipment to maintain database workloads). Although some solutions are advertised as open, they actually have serious licensing restrictions that are unprofitable for the buyer.

2) Open source is not a solution that is suitable for any company. Solutions of this type can work well in vertical markets, but for conventional companies they can become a source of new problems. For any database, it is important to consider what support is provided for it, since database maintenance requires significant labor time and resources. In addition, open-source databases do not have clear development plans, they are poorly structured, which can create problems at a certain level.

3) Determine exactly how much it will cost to operate a custom application or workload. Unfortunately, these costs are often much more than projected.

New model

According to Gartner , for real business transformation and increasing revenues, “companies need to apply a new business application strategy that reflects business needs to apply technology to gain an edge over competitors and introduce innovative processes, but at the same time provides a safe and cost-effective environment to support core business processes. "

Enterprises continue to introduce virtualization and successful companies by saving costs on their database will be able to invest more money in innovation. Modern high-performance servers can simultaneously serve several applications and companies should not pay for their nominal capacity, but only for the resources that the database actually used. A flexible licensing model can be a strategic resource that will help companies spend on money the innovations that used to pay for licenses.