Insights for IT Negotiations Insights for IT Negotiations

Welcome to Insights for IT Negotiations, a podcast by UpperEdge, a leading IT sourcing, negotiation, and project execution advisory firm. Join John Belden, UpperEdge’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer, and Kylie Chisholm, UpperEdge’s Marketing Manager, every other week as they share valuable insights to help you maximize the value of your key IT relationships.


This week, John and Kylie chatted with Shane Griffin, one of UpperEdge’s Oracle advisors, to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Oracle's Universal Credits model. These licensing models are notoriously tricky to unravel, but understand the key components of the services can help you effectively evaluate and negotiate with Oracle. This episode gives you the strategies you need to better understand and leverage these models.

Resources Mentioned:


UPCOMING WEBINAR – Vendor AI-Enabled Delivery Models: Extracting Value from Your IT Suppliers
ON-DEMAND WEBINAR – Unraveling Oracle’s OCI and Universal Credit Model

Other Resources:


BLOG POST – 5 Tips for Negotiating with Oracle
PODCAST – Oracle Q4 FY24 Earnings: How Customers Can Navigate OCI Growth Opportunities

Explore our Oracle Advisory Services to see how we help our clients optimize their Oracle deals. For a more tailored conversation around your organization’s Oracle relationship and goals, reach out today to chat with our expert advisors.

For more innovative IT sourcing and risk mitigation insights, subscribe to the UpperEdge newsletter and follow UpperEdge on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Welcome to Insights for IT Negotiations, a podcast by UpperEdge, a leading IT sourcing, negotiation, and project execution advisory firm. Join John Belden, UpperEdge’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer, and Kylie Chisholm, UpperEdge’s Marketing Manager, every other week as they share valuable insights to help you maximize the value of your key IT relationships.



This week, John and Kylie chatted with Michael Wesseler, one of UpperEdge's SAP advisors, to discuss what we learned at SAP Sapphire this year. Michael discusses SAP's RISE and AI strategy, some of the questions customers still have after the conference, and ways to leverage what you learned at the negotiation table.


Resources Mentioned:


UPCOMING WEBINAR - Vendor AI-Enabled Delivery Models: Extracting Value from Your IT Suppliers
ON-DEMAND WEBINAR - Unraveling Oracle's OCI and Universal Credit Model

Other Resources:


LINKEDIN NEWSLETTER - Pre-Sapphire Insights
LINKEDIN NEWSLETTER - Post-Sapphire Insights
ON-DEMAND WEBINAR - Navigating the Inevitable Journey to SAP RISE



Explore our SAP Advisory Services to see how we help our clients optimize their SAP deals. For a more tailored conversation around your organization's SAP relationship and goals, reach out today to chat with our expert advisors.

Oracle reported a great quarter, with their stock price up over 13%. A significant amount of their growth this quarter was cloud related, with their cloud revenue up over 23%. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) revenue was also up 53%. Going forward, Oracle forecasts a tremendous amount of increase, including OCI growth at over 50% and total revenue growth at a double-digit rate.

In this podcast, our Oracle Practice Leader, Jeff Lazarto, highlights some key growth opportunities for Oracle, including AI and cloud opportunities. He also breaks down how Oracle customers can use the vendor’s clear goals as leverage in their upcoming negotiations.

For a more in depth discussion on how to evaluate and negotiate OCI, register for next week’s webinar here > https://upperedge.com/knowledge-center/webinars/event/unraveling-oracles-oci-and-universal-credit-model/

Host: Jeff Lazarto: https://bit.ly/37eCXdN

Oracle Commercial Advisory Services: https://bit.ly/3jdtF7p

Workday reported a strong quarter, with their revenue up 17% from the prior quarter and 18% year-over-year. However, this revenue is still down from the 20% growth they were experiencing in prior years. As a result, they have lowered their projection numbers for the remainder of the year.

Workday is citing scrutiny on how money is being allocated for net new deals, something we are seeing happening across all software vendors. Customers are weary to take on larger transformation project and larger investments, especially when there is a lot of uncertainty in the market. Headcount growth was also cited as a reason for their lowered projection numbers.

In this podcast, Workday Practice Leader Jeff Lazarto gives a high-level overview of the recent earnings results. He also maps out what to expect from Workday in the coming quarters as they try to accelerate revenue growth, especially for those clients in the public services, healthcare, and financial services industries. Lastly, he covers how customers can prepare for their upcoming Workday negotiations and renewals given this information.

Host: Jeff Lazarto: https://bit.ly/37eCXdN

Workday Commercial Advisory Services: https://bit.ly/3A6KOXt

Salesforce’s Q1 FY25 total revenue came in at $9.13B, representing an 11% growth year-over-year. This was on the lower end of their guided range and came up short of the analyst expected $9.17B. Salesforce now expects their FY25 subscription and support revenue growth to come in slightly below 10% (Salesforce’s better way of saying single digit). Elongated deal cycles, deal compression, and high levels of budget scrutiny have been cited as the driving factors to the slowed growth.

It is clear from the earnings call that Salesforce, and the Salesforce account executives, need to turn things around; your Saleforce reps will be focused on getting customers to adopt Data Cloud and their GenAI offering, Einstein Copilot. They will also be leaning on price and packaging changes to drive revenue growth as well.

In this podcast, Salesforce Practice Leader, Adam Mansfield, discusses what Salesforce’s earnings mean for customers and what customers should expect from Salesforce as they push through their upcoming negotiations, whether in term or at renewal. In addition, Adam provides his perspective on how best to prepare for Salesforce’s aggressive push to upsell and cross sell their current customers.

Host: Adam Mansfield: https://bit.ly/3rPGp8r

SalesForce Commercial Advisory Services: https://bit.ly/2V78ADX

Microsoft announced their FY24 Q3 earnings yesterday. Total revenue was reported as $61.9B, better than the $60.9B analysts were expecting. The critically important Microsoft Cloud revenue, which includes Azure, O365 Commercial, LinkedIn, Dynamics 365 and other cloud products, came in at $35.1B, representing a 23% increase year-over-year. Microsoft’s Azure revenue grew 31% in the quarter, which is an acceleration from the prior quarter with 7 points coming from Microsoft’s AI services.

Microsoft’s go-forward success and revenue growth will continue to be directly tied to Microsoft’s ability to get more customers to adopt cloud products, AI solutions (Copilot for Microsoft 365, Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Service, GitHub Copilot, and Azure OpenAI) and migrate to the costly all-in Microsoft 365 E5 suite.

In this podcast, our Microsoft Practice Leader, Adam Mansfield, discusses how customers can take advantage of Microsoft’s needs and focus areas to ensure the right deal is struck at the negotiation table. He also covers what enterprise customers should expect from Microsoft as they prepare for their in-term (“early renewal”) or renewal negotiations.

Host: Adam Mansfield: https://bit.ly/3rPGp8r

Microsoft Commercial Advisory Services: https://bit.ly/2V78ADX