ITAM Forum asks software giants to stop browbeating customers onto their clouds with threats of licence audits

The new chair of the ITAM Forum, a body set up in part to help organisations traverse the software licensing minefield, has called on vendors to stop using the prospect of licence audits to influence customers' cloud infrastructure decisions. With Oracle, SAP and IBM having a huge installed base of on-premises enterprise …

[Steve Davies 3]

Stop 'forced' migration to the Cloud?

Are you having a larf?

You can't be serious!

etc etc etc

The 'software giants' will soon (if not already) be making on premises really, really, really more expensive that their cloud offering. Naturally, they'll hide the costs of getting your (as in yours not theirs) data out of it again.

These companies have you over a barrel and will be shafting you from day 1. The Beancounters will love it because they can show reduced CAPEX and to hell with OPEX. They'll have moved on to other companies by the time the chickens come home to roost. It would not surprise me if we see a company go TITSUP because they can't get THEIR data out of the Cloud with their cash in hand. Who's data is it when the original owner goes TITSUP and can't pay their cloud fees? Are their the equivalent of Cloud Baliffs?

[dwyermic]

Re: Stop 'forced' migration to the Cloud?

CLOUD = Complete Loss Of User Data

(from the Hitler Rant Parody series)

[HildyJ]

Re: Stop 'forced' migration to the Cloud?

In related news, pigs were asked to fly.

Experts feel that this has a greater chance of happening.

[Pascal Monett]

"the practice was counterproductive in a vendor-customer relationship"

Actually no, it isn't. It is going to be a great incentive for companies to transit to Open Source, free alternatives, and the market for those products is going to expand dramatically.

After that, current closed-source cloud vendors will be begging for companies to return by offering dirt-cheap prices.

That's capitalism. The wheel turns. The future is Open Source. It may take a while, but Oracle & Co are on their last legs already. Dead man walking.

They just don't know it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Been there...

Oracle did it to us. After months and months of badgering us to to their cloud platform, and us rejecting their every advance, they first tried the end-around, going directly to upper management with the pitch, and then when that was rebuffed the audit letter arrived. But helpfully they'll provide you with someone at Oracle who can guide you through the audit process and make sure it goes smoothly, with just the slightest hint that you can make it all go away if you'd just move everything to the cloud. They're too smart to come right out and say it, but you don't have to be a genius to understand the game. We basically said "Fuck it, we know we're close so audit us." and ended up paying them about $8K for some missing dev licenses. I'll pay $8K over cloud extortion any day, but I can understand why others fear the risk and decide differently.