Making Sense of Licensing Structures for Database Management Systems

By David Kim, SEA Managing Director, Tmaxsoft

If you ask someone to name a handful of highly innovative companies, Apple is almost certainly one of the first to spring to mind for many people. But Porsche, the car manufacturer, might not be – and yet Apple and Porsche share a business strategy that defines transformative companies: investing the profits from legacy products into new innovations.

In fact, 81% of respondents in Asian companies view technological innovation as a key role in driving revenue growth, according to a Salesforce’s report in 2017. For any company looking to accelerate innovation, custom applications and products are the key to differentiating an enterprise from its competitors– but this requires investment, and funding core business processes is crippling many companies’ innovative potential.

Necessary Processes, Unnecessary Costs
Core business processes will differ by industry and company function, but one common to all modern enterprises is the database – the backbone of a company – as well as the database management systems (DBMS) that support it. In this digital era, enterprises across all sectors are prompted to adopt different database management tools in order to handle the large amount of data generated. According to Inkwood Research, The Asia Pacific Enterprise Database Management Systems market is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 9% over the forecast period of 2017-2020, mainly driven by financial, healthcare, banking, retail/wholesale and telecommunications sectors.

Paying for a DBMS is not cheap. Private and hybrid cloud infrastructures are becoming more popular in Asia Pacific, with the emergence of hybrid cloud set to be a game-changer that is gaining traction amongst CIOs. According to a survey by Microsoft in November 2016, about 42% of the companies are already on the hybrid cloud journey in the region, and this is expected to increase to 48% by mid-2018.

In the banking industry, IDC believes that at least 80% of the banks will run on a hybrid cloud architecture by 2018. As a result, CFOs are paying more attention to the operational costs of the database tier, because licensing and support expense of DBMS can be a substantial line item on many IT budgets. Users can get caught in a spiral where support and maintenance prices rise year after year.

In addition, existing DBMS licenses might be required based on the server’s maximum number of server cores, not the cores actually being used. As the industry moves toward software-defined datacenters (SDDC) and hyper convergence (the ability to consolidate multiple applications onto one piece of hardware), the realities of virtualization mean that many companies only use a percentage of the available processing power of their servers – but still pay for the full server capacity, plus the ancillary hardware required to run workloads.

This may result in a database expense disproportionate to the benefits received, consuming precious dollars that could be better spent on IT innovation.

Solution: Flexible Licensing
Companies need not feel bound to their current methods of paying for DBMS. A popular new option – the flexible licensing model – is much more aligned with the realities of modern database consolidation.

A flexible licensing model for database workloads is attractive to many companies because they don’t need to buy software tied to a specific size hardware; they can simply license the database software based on true utilization, and scale over time, completely decoupling application from hardware. This model allows enterprises to maximize their virtualization investment by only licensing the computing power associated with a given virtual machine, rather than a 100 percent licensing model, regardless of amount of resources the database consumes.

With flexible licensing, companies only pay for the cores actually used in the server, not the total number of cores in that server – a distinction that is critically important for the virtualization component of private and hybrid cloud usage. Many companies such as data-intensive, require highly available clustered applications and data ponds or high security database encryption are ideal for this type of model.

In a flexible licensing model, the major benefit is how a company pays – it gets all of the same features of legacy DBMS options, but under a much more rational pricing structure. This allows a company to invest more in the innovative ventures that will drive revenue, as opposed to the base processes that simply allow the business to function.

Navigating DBMS Payment Options: What the C-Level Needs to Know
Not all DBMS licensing structures are created equal. When exploring options, there are three key things to keep in mind:
1 – Be cognizant of licensing models and potential hidden costs (e.g., needing extra hardware to run workloads in the database). Some solutions advertise themselves as open, but digging into the specifics may reveal a restrictive model that does not favor the customer.
2 – Open source isn’t the solution for every company; these types of solutions can work well for a niche audience, but for others, they create other issues. It’s important to consider the support model of any database solution, because open-source databases require a substantial amount of time and resources.
Additionally, open-source databases do not have a clear roadmap; their very nature is to be loosely structured, and that can be challenging on some levels.
3 – Know the true cost of running a custom application or workload. The unfortunate truth is that it may be far higher than what a company originally projected.

A New Model
To become truly transformative while increasing profits, “organizations must establish a new strategy for business applications that responds to the desire of the business to use technology to establish sustainable differentiation and drive innovative new processes, while providing a secure and cost-effective environment to support core business processes,” according to Gartner.
As enterprises continue to move toward virtualization, successful companies will have more money for innovation by reducing their database costs. Powerful servers are meant to run not just one application, and companies should only pay for what its database actually uses, not its potential processing power. A flexible licensing mode can be a strategic asset by helping a company to redirect software license savings into innovation.

About David Kim
Mr. David has served as TmaxSoft SEA Managing Director and CEO since June 2013. He drives business across South East Asia based in Singapore.
Previously, David severed as regional product manager and enterprise solution consultant of Hewlett Packard Asia Pacific from 2007 to 2013. Prior to those positions, Mr Kim has position of regional lead for technical consultant and solution marketing in Hewlett Packard Asia Pacific.

Mr. Kim graduated with Master Degree of Computer Engineering in a University, Korea and an MBA from University of Southern Queensland in Australia.

About TmaxSoft

TmaxSoft is a global software innovator focused on cloud, infrastructure and legacy modernization, with solutions that offer enterprise CIOs viable alternatives to support their global IT powerhouses and drive competitive advantage. Tibero is the best enterprise RDBMS for the Virtual Data Center. OpenFrame is a legacy rehosting solution that enables mainframe applications, resources and data to be migrated to a less expensive, high performance open or cloud system while reducing TCO and minimizing risk of migration. JEUS is the first Web Application Server in the world to be J2EE 1.4, JAVA EE 5, and JAVA EE 6 Certified, and delivers improved security over traditional WAS. TmaxSoft was founded in 1997 in South Korea and today has over 1,000 employees in 20 strategic centers around the world. The company’s global headquarters is located in Chicago. Please visit www.tmaxsoft.com for more information