Event Summary
"REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., Dec. 16 /PRNewswire/ Today, Oracle Corp. announced
lower software and support prices for the Oracle8i database. Specifically, the
price of Oracle8i Standard Edition was lowered 40% from $25 per power unit to
$15 per power unit, while Oracle8i Enterprise Edition was cut 50% from $200
per power unit to $100 per power unit.
"Every
time we lower prices we sell more software," said Larry Ellison, Oracle Chairman
and CEO. "Just about the only reason people cite for not buying Oracle8i is
price. Now that's fixed. Internet computing has driven the popularity of our
database to an all-time high. Lowering prices will increase the overall size
of the database market." Database prices are effectively reduced even further
by making some separately priced optional features standard. Two key Internet
options -- interMedia, a text and multimedia search engine, and Jserver, an
integrated Java interpreter -- are now included with both Oracle8i standard
and enterprise editions at no additional cost."
Market
Impact
As
stated by Ellison, "Our real competition is Windows NT, not SQL Server", the
competing database product from Microsoft Corporation. Oracle is aiming at the
midrange to workgroup market with this move, hoping to take market share away
from Microsoft. These changes do not affect Oracle's named-user pricing model
according to Ellison, but support pricing has been standardized at 7 percent
of the software cost for continuous coverage. In addition, Ellison is hoping
that all of Oracle's sales can be booked via the Internet within the next year,
which would serve to reduce sales overhead. Oracle's stock has more than tripled
within the last three months, reflecting investors' confidence in Mr. Ellison's
strategies. The most interesting aspect of Ellison's strategy is to go after
customers that don't store their data in a database, but in a traditional file
system, such as Windows NT. As stated by Ellison "We're going after the NT file
server market." If Oracle's stated strategy is successful, they could pick up
a huge piece of business in the low to mid-range customer base.
User
Recommendations
Customers who are investigating better ways to track and analyze their data
should consider Oracle 8i for this purpose, especially if they use dynamically
generated web pages. If the web pages are static, serving them from the file
system may enhance performance. The downside of Oracle's success is that their
revenue stream has been very strong, which reduces the software vendor's usual
approach of giving discounts to make sales quotas at the end of the quarter/year.
Customers should also investigate Microsoft SQL Server and IBM's DB2 Universal
Database, and do price comparisons to maximize their leverage with the vendor.