Palisade Compliance: Bringing Back the Control of Oracle Contracts

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Stephen Sopko, COO

As the leading independent provider of Oracle software and cloud licensing, contracting, and compliance advisory services, Palisade Compliance helps clients save money, ensure license compliance, and take back control of their Oracle relationship. Formed by former Oracle Vice Presidents, Palisade brings years of experience to the table. The company’s co-founders, Craig Guarente and Stephen Sopko were both in charge of contracts, business practices, and customer audit at Oracle and founded Palisade to help customers negotiate new license deals with Oracle. As clients approached Palisade with various issues related to Oracle licensing and contracting strategy, the company evolved its business and developed a portfolio of services to address their needs. While there are numerous Oracle resellers in the market, Palisade is uniquely independent of Oracle to help clients resolve compliance issues without any potential revenue or bias.

In this interview, Sopko, COO of Palisade, shares some insights about the organization’s innovativeapproach toward compliance advisory services, experienced executive team and their unique value proposition, and roadmap for the future.

What are the challenges that CIOs face with Oracle systems and how does Palisade address those issues?

We do not carry out the technical implementation for Oracle servers as we are 100 percent focused on license optimization, helping clients spend less on Oracle and get their license under control. The biggest pain point that clients face is the complexity of Oracle contracts.Oracle’s ambiguous license terms and confusing contracts make it difficult for organizations to understand and apply those rules. The ambiguity in contracts also leads to frustrations among organizations due to the number of surprises regarding additional purchases during implementation. In such a scenario, Oracle license audits can not only prove to be time-consuming but can also result in multi-million dollar non-compliance findings. Most organizations do not have the Oracle-specific skills or dedicated resources to handle an Oracle audit successfully. Our Audit Defense team can advise and represent clients through every stage of an Oracle audit, offering expert assistance. At Palisade, we carry out a complete compliance assurance engagement, employing customized, flexible service models to get the right amount of clarity of contracts based on each client’s situation. Our processes often mirror Oracleʼs, but we have found a better way that produces better results with less client IT effort.

Can you elaborate on Palisade’s approach in solving client’s problems with regard to license optimization and contract negotiations?

We start by focusing on the client’s Oracle contracts; most organizations skip this step because it is complicated, but contracts contain a tremendous amount of valuable information that needs to be considered while counting their Oracle estate.

We start by focusing on the client’s Oracle contracts; most organizations skip this step because it is complicated, but contracts contain a tremendous amount of valuable information that needs to be considered while counting their Oracle state

Our team has decades of experience working at Oracle, negotiating contracts and reviewing terms and conditions, bring clarity to fairly complex elements of an Oracle contract to clients. The next step is license auditing that is conducted by former auditors at Oracle. We combine Oracle contract expertise with Oracle audit expertise to give our clients an unparalleled view of what they have, what they are using, non-compliance gaps to be addressed and how to address them. We help clients mitigate compliance issues in the best way possible.

About a third of our business comes from defending clients against an Oracle audit; the second third from helping them with one of their license agreement. In both of these cases, clients want us around to continue advising them to avoid Oracle audits and save millions of dollars spent on Oracle software and support. Clients want us to work side by side with their IT legal and procurement teams to give them ongoing advice. On the other hand, some of our clients return to us every two to three years when they encounter an Oracle issue.

Could you throw some light on your customer base and share a use case scenario wherein you helped a client overcome their challenges?

We have worked with some of the largest Oracle customers including Fortune 500 companies, but we have also supported clients with only two Oracle servers. We have served clients of all sizes and every major industry because we understand their specific issues. That said, Oracle is the common thread in all cases.

In an instance, a major food company was in a situation where they wanted to have better clarity about their Oracle estate to save money on support and reduce unneeded usage of Oracle as they continued to grow. The client with multiple Oracle products approached us. We saw that the client had a professionally maintained IT environment and did not have major compliance issues. After the engagement, the food company was able to look at various third-party support and other alternatives to Oracle that gave them the cost savings and control over the Oracle relationships they wanted. That is exactly what we do—we help clients get control over the critical IT vendor relationship with Oracle and back into their own hands.

What differentiates Palisade from its competitors?

One of our prime differentiators is that we are completely independent of Oracle. Second, we hire professionals who have years of experience at Oracle doing audits and contract negotiations. Also, the creativity that we use when we help our clients carry out the auditing and review of contracts is a bonus. Rather than simply following the Oracle playbook for counting licenses, we have developed our own methodologies that combine the capability of Oracle scripts used for audits. In addition, we can work with any third-party software providers with the ability to be platform and tech agnostic and adapt to what clients want to achieve.

What does the future hold for your organization?

We already have a good presence in APAC, Europe, the Middle East and East Africa, which is geographically large for a fairly small company.The biggest thing that is changing for us is we know in addition to our extremely high end customized services that clients want, we have also been asked by our clients to come up with more packaged services, such as audit protect plan or unlimited license agreement assessments. So, we are not only focusing on providing customized servicesto clients but also very high-level strategic services to show them where they stand before they make any larger investments.