Understand your estate

One bit of advice I can give, is before you negotiate your license deal, understand what your needs are, and how to efficiently licence it on the simplest model. Most of the big vendors will do you an Enterprise of Universal license deal which involves a big upfront payment to the vendor to lock in technology for four or five years.

Before you do this better have a good idea when you are going to need those extra licenses, or you will land up paying over the odds. Always base your deal on what you have now licensed the best way, with realistic growth. Make sure you have the right balance between User and Device based licenses. Just because you have 30 CPUs, doesn't mean you need 30 CPU licenses, especially with Oracle. Also understand how Web facing servers relate to internal servers, it may be that a web facing system requires CPU licenses, but that the internal systems it interfaces with do not. I cut £1.5M from a deal by getting that sum right.

The best way to do it, is to model your license requirement, against basic licenses and your asset and user base in Excel, its not that difficult to do for Oracle and Microsoft, overall, for about 40 hours development time, I've probably save £3M on license costs for deals over the past three years. Excluding the others who have taken it on.

Once you have run the licensing through, and have an accurate picture of the license costs, you can cut the holiday from Barbados to Bognor. Sadly, it's often the procurement departments who do these negotiations, and they only need to reduce the cost, not get it right.

(Sorry, I don't do licensing any more, so the spreadsheets are out of date, but hay Reg, if you have an Excel Wizard on the Staff, there's a market niche for you)

To be fair with the French

That expression is meant sarcastically.

This is a comment one makes when discovering something that is needlessly difficult to understand.