A global hospitality group entered the engagement with a $42M Oracle ULA up for certification. The opening Oracle position assumed a renewal, expanded product set and a 12% uplift. Twelve weeks later, the client certified out of products it no longer used, kept the products that mattered, and signed a three-year support track at materially lower cost.
The client signed its Oracle Unlimited License Agreement five years earlier during an aggressive global expansion. By the time we joined, the technology estate had consolidated onto a smaller core, deployment of three of the eleven entitled products had stopped, and the internal sponsor for the original ULA had left.
Two facts mattered most. First, certification was eighteen months away and Oracle had already opened conversations. Second, the contract's product list included three high-value SKUs that the deployment team confirmed were dormant.
Oracle's account team proposed a five-year renewal with the same product set, two added products at preferential ULA pricing, and a 12% uplift to support. The proposed certification path was light on evidence and heavy on assumption.
The proposed renewal would have locked support against products the client had already decided to retire. Once inside a renewed ULA, exiting those products costs more, not less.
The engagement ran in four parallel tracks. Each one fed into a single position paper that the client's CIO took into the final round.
We worked with the client's infrastructure and DBA teams to produce a certifiable deployment record for every ULA product. For the three dormant products, the evidence package documented zero active installations and a retirement timeline.
Oracle's proposed support number was reverse-engineered against installed base, not ULA scope. We rebuilt support against the certified position and the products the client actually intended to keep.
We modelled three exit shapes: full certify-out, partial certify-out with renegotiated support, and a renewal at reduced scope. The middle path won on five-year TCO.
We wrote the position paper, the CIO presented it, and our team supported the three follow-up rounds with Oracle.
An Oracle ULA does not negotiate itself. The leverage is in the evidence pack and the credible alternative position. Both have to be in place before the first commercial conversation.
The client certified out of three products. The remaining product set transitioned to a three-year support track at the rebuilt level. The two products Oracle had pushed for were not added. A clause was added making future product additions a discrete negotiation, not a ULA expansion.
Tell us the certification date and the product list. We will respond within one business day with the lead and the most relevant precedent.