Oracle made the move a few weeks ago in response to requests from
distribution partners but chose not to publicise it, unlike two
previous changes in its multi-core licensing that took place in July and December 2005. Details of the most recent licensing changes can be found here. An Oracle spokeswoman confirmed the move late Friday.
Oracle announced distribution agreements with Tech Data and Ingram
Micro in 2006 as a way to attract more small to mid-size business
customers. Oracle used input from those distributors to put in place
the right packaging and pricing to speed up its growth in the SMB
market, according to the Oracle spokeswoman. Oracle's reseller
partnership with Dell has also increased sales of Oracle's software in
the mid-market.
"We can go down into SMB but Microsoft can't move up after two
decades of attempts," the Oracle spokeswoman wrote in an email. "We are
now building on that success by adding more high volume distributors.
Every deal we get from these new partners would have gone to Microsoft
a year ago."
Under the changes that came into effect 16 February, Oracle has
removed some restrictions on the licensing of its low-end Standard
Edition and Standard Edition One databases for multi-core servers,
making the cost of software substantially cheaper. The move brings
Oracle more into line with Microsoft's pricing of its SQL Server
database charging per processor socket not by number of processor
cores.
Pricing for Oracle's higher-end Database Enterprise Edition remains
the same and rather torturous since it depends on a formula that uses a
variable processor factor multiplied by the number of processor cores
to determine the price. The processor factor is 0.25 for Sun's
UltraSparc T1 chips, but 0.50 for chips from AMD and Intel and then
0.75 for all other multi-core chips including those from IBM.
In July 2005, Oracle announced it would no longer charge an
individual license for each processor core, instead defining each
processor core on multi-core chips as 0.75 of a processor. Then in
December of that year, the vendor changed that model to bring in
separate pricing schemes for different vendors' chips.
At present, Oracle is without an executive to oversee its product pricing and licensing.
Jacqueline Woods, who was vice president of global pricing and
licensing strategy at Oracle, recently left the company to join General
Electric. A GE spokeswoman confirmed that Woods had joined the company
as global director of segmentation. Oracle wouldn't comment on Woods'
departure or who will replace her.
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