News Summary

• The European Commission is gathering information on how Oracle licenses its software in the cloud.
• It is following a similar approach it used against SAP two months ago.
• The practices under scrutiny are not particularly dramatic, but they can be effective.
• Licensing terms that make software more expensive to run on a rival cloud, or contracts that are difficult to exit, can keep customers tied to a provider.
• Oracle’s databases are particularly difficult to replace, giving licensing terms more leverage than they would have with a typical productivity application.