By: Dan Woods, Forbes

Oracle spends a lot of its energy and effort on persuading, some would say strong-arming, its clients into adopting its cloud technology. And lately, every year, Oracle rolls out some new techniques to get clients to pay for its cloud technology even if they don’t use it.

This creates the unusual situation in which Oracle may be the first cloud vendor with significant unused cloud capacity, so much so that its unused capacity might be more than what clients are actually using. We can’t know for sure if this is true, but it is certainly more likely with Oracle than other cloud vendors where the technology is purchased and immediately used by customers.

To read entire article and learn more about Oracle's strong- arm tactics, click below:

By: Mike Welsh, NET(net)

As many of you may already know, most SAP renewal deals ‘come due’ in December, as they are generally annualized to the calendar year, as are most new SAP license purchases and expansions. SAP is hungry for new licensing revenue, so customers can expect to see increased activity around year-end audits.  Now is the time to start planning (and saving), especially if you’re already paying for annual maintenance and support services from to SAP.

Click below to read more on why paying for SAP M&S is a mistake.

By: Robin Fry, Global Banking and Finance Review

The exercise of ‘software license reviews’ or ‘software audits’, most notably by Oracle, SAP, IBM, Informatica and Microsoft, has increasingly become a revenue-generation mechanism for these vendors.

Against the backdrop of a huge number of IT systems being moved to the cloud, with Amazon and Google establishing themselves as market leaders, the historically dominant software vendors are urgently seeking additional revenue from elsewhere: their existing base of on-premise software customers. 

To read more about these very specific risks, please click the Read More buttons below.