Consultant: How to deal with Oracle licensing
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InfoWorld - A consultant offered advice Tuesday regarding how Oracle customers can get the best deal and protect themselves while licensing software from the enterprise software giant.
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The tool makes it easier for Oracle users with limited programming experience to build, deploy and manage secure Web applications with information contained in Oracle databases.
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Will Sun's $1 billion buyout of open source database vendor SQL drive down pricing on enterprise databases from IBM, Microsoft of Oracle?
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Although real comparability to Oracle and IBM databases could still be some time away, MySQL's new authorized hosting program might help broaden out the niche for the open source database a lot more quickly.
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NEW YORK - PeopleSoft's acceptance of an Oracle takeover finally ends 18 months of uncertainty for both companies' customers, but opens new challenges for the victor. As Oracle embarks on one of the software industry's largest acquisitions in history, it needs to prove it can chew what it has bitten off.ADVERTISEMENTSolaris 10(TM) OS: Position your business ten moves ahead.Solaris 10 OS has arrived and provides even more reasons for the world's most demanding businesses to operate on this, the leading UNIX platform. Like the fact you can run Linux and Solaris applications side-by-side and run the same OS on SPARC(R), AMD Opteron(TM), and Intel processor-based systems. Discover more reasons and how Solaris 10 OS can move your business ahead today.
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InfoWorld - In response to requests from some of its distribution partners, Oracle has changed the licensing pricing for some of its lower-end multicore servers in order to be more competitive with database rival Microsoft.
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Letter Can collective database licensing cure this tragedy of the commons?
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(InfoWorld) - Oracle is making a number of moves to improve access management and other security features for its users. The enterprise software maker said Wednesday that its Oracle Identity Management product is now certified to work with its E-Business Suite 12, JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.12, and Siebel 8 applications. Oracle also said certification on its PeopleSoft Enterprise 9 applications is expected by June. Oracle also said that its Database Vault security product has been certified to run on PeopleSoft Enterprise applications. Database Vault is designed to protect against "insider threats" to data security by restricting who can access what data, where, when, and how. It is particularly focused on helping companies meet governance and compliance requirements. Oracle also introduced Oracle Management Pack for Identity Management, which it said helps reduce the cost and complexity of managing identity and access management systems. The Identity Management product is an enhancement of Oracle's Enterprise Manager 10g product. Its identity and access management functions work across multiple software brands and operating systems.
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In a quick note from the fine folks at OTN, is a pointer to a new technical note that demonstrates how to create and manage custom login and sign-off pages for SSO using PHP. "If you have installed Oracle Application Server 10g Enterprise Edition and are ready to create custom SSO login and sign-off pages, then you might want to consider using PHP over the traditional PL/SQL and JSP methods. A big advantage of using PHP over PL/SQL and JSP is the ease with which the pages can be deployed and modified. With PHP, you simply open the file, make a change, and save the file. The new page and changes are picked up instantly."
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Flexible friend Microsoft has updated the licensing terms and conditions of its popular database for the benefit of virtualized computing environments.â¦
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One of the most important recent events in the world of free software has been the release of version 3 of the GNU GPL.  There were fierce arguments about its utility while it was being drawn up, and although the rhetoric has abated somewhat, there is still a big question mark over its eventual success.  Some evidence suggests that GPLv3 uptake is coming along nicely, while other reports indicate a reluctance to adopt it (but note also Matt Asay's neat reconciliation of these contradictory messages).  To see what's likely to happen in the long term, it's useful to look back at the past history of licence adoption.
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Oracle may be willing to spend a record sum -- over $6 billion -- to acquire a middleware provider it believes will give it a permanent leg up on Microsoft's SQL Server. Does it still take a huge M&A like this to stay on par with Microsoft?
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Users of technology from both companies today expressed concern about Oracle's $8.5 billion agreement to buy BEA Systems and to fold in the latter's middleware to the Oracle software stack.The BEA board of director's vote to approve the sale for $19.375 a share comes just three months after it spurned Oracle's $6.7 billion offer in October to buy the middleware vendor.Burc Oral, a senior architect at Cambridge, Mass.-based government contractor Cell Exchange, said that while the acquisition will give users the option of buying a database and application server from a single vendor, he also expects a period of "confusion" for BEA users because of technology overlap.Oral, who also heads up the New England BEA User Group, said that he expects that the deal will likely mean the end of some products -- "a little from Oracle and a lot from BEA."Oral said that Oracle would be well served to retain BEA's WebLogic product, which has a hearty following among users, who have been provided with good support from BEA over the years. "[BEA] had their [WebLogic] product out there many years before Oracle was out there," Oral said. "[It] is very easy to use and BEA has always been very friendly to the user community with downloads and documentation. Oracle doesn't have this wide acceptance from the user community in terms of applications. With BEA life is a lot easier."But, he noted that since Oracle made its first bid for BEA in October, the middleware firm has been less responsive than usual to the user group. In addition, Oral said that users from previous Oracle acquisitions including Siebel and Hyperion appear to be "getting better value" from a larger organization that they did before the acquisition.Jim Burgard, assistant vice chancellor of university computing and communication at the University of New Orleans, said that he doesn't expect the deal to significantly impact his organization, which uses WebLogic with Oracle's PeopleSoft applications. However, he added that he "does have some concerns about future licensing and maintenance costs now that all the components are owned by one vendor."Mike Gilpin, an analyst with Forrester Research, said that Burgard's fear is not unfounded, noting that there is a chance that support costs for users of BEA's WebLogic Server, AquaLogic Service Bus, AquaLogic BPM, WebLogic Event Server, and AquaLogic SOA Management products will grow after the deal closes later this year.Gilpin did note that Oracle has promised "lifetime support" for BEA products that overlap Oracle's offerings. That means that BEA users won't have to dump their BEA products but may over time pay more for support, he said. If they do move to Oracle's technology, they'll have to pay for migration, Gilpin added."Oracle has assured us that they will be very mindful of protecting the interests of existing BEA customers, just as they have been for customers of PeopleSoft and Siebel -- and I find their assurances credible," Gilpin said "It's not in Oracle's interest to aggravate these customers, In many cases they are already Oracle customers, anyway."Todd Langille, project manager of Administrative Computing for Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., said that he has concerns over whether Oracle has a "clear coherent strategy" for its growing software portfolio, which includes many similar products.For example, he noted that Oracle bought business intelligence software vendors Hyperion and Siebel despite have its own BI tool set, Discover. "I take a look at that mix of acquisitions, and I'm not really sure what their data warehouse strategy will be with all their business intelligence products in play," he remarked.Langille did note that because Dartmouth runs both Oracle Application Server and BEA's WebLogic software, it's not as important to him which product becomes the database vendor's primary middleware offering. "We see [the acquisition] as probably a knocking down of competition, but given that we use both products, we stand to benefit from whatever intellectual properly Oracle [gains]," he added.BEA should expedite Oracle's efforts to construct a standards-based middleware architecture, Langille said. However, he acknowledged that it will take some time before any wholesale replacement for Oracle Application Server arrives."I don't think products are identical, and for that reason, I don't think one will disappear quickly," he added.Patricia Dues, enterprise program manager for the city of Las Vegas, said she hopes Oracle can use BEA technology to improve its various offerings. For example, she said she hopes software acquired from BEA can augment the analytical capability of Oracle's Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition offering recently purchased by the city."We realize what Oracle has done with other acquisitions in taking the best of both worlds. There's always room for improvement, and this sparks our interest with the acquisition of BEA," said Dues.Dues downplayed any concerns that Oracle's ongoing attrition of its software competitors - both large and small - may divert the company's focus away from existing customers or product roadmaps. "I don't see this as what Larry [Ellison] wants. I think there's a strategy behind it all. I can't say that I feel like [Oracle] is going to desert us, they have too many products to manage," she said.
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The worlds of Open Source and proprietary software have collided once more with the news that Debian - builder of a version of the GNU/Linux operating system - announcing it cannot live with the terms of Microsoft&#39;s licence for its technology in the
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(InfoWorld) - While most of Oracle's recent purchases have focused on growing its applications business, the vendor's latest proposed purchase will beef up its growing identity management operation. Oracle announced Wednesday that it has agreed to buyÂ Bharosa, a provider of software to help detect online identity theft and fraud. The companies didn't reveal the financial details of the acquisition, which is expected to close next month. "The transaction will extend Oracle's Identity Management capabilities by adding proactive real time risk-analysis, strong authentication and fraud prevention," Hasan Rizvi, vice president, identity management and security products at Oracle, wrote in a letter to customers. Identity Management is part of Oracle's Fusion middleware. Bharosa has two main products -- Tracker, antifraud software that works by verifying a variety of factors to confirm identity, and Authenticator, a suite of secure authentication software, which works with Web browsers to protect a range of sensitive information such as passwords from malicious attacks. Once the purchase is completed, Oracle plans to add some of Bharosa's Tracker and Authenticator software to its existing online single sign-on (SSO) and Web-based authorization security products. The intention is to expand the use of Oracle's identity management software outside of an enterprise to safely encompass external users. At the same time, Oracle committed to continue to make Bharosa's software available on a stand-alone basis and to offer integrations with non-Oracle databases and applications as well as its own products. Bharosa has more than 30 customers for its real-time fraud detection and multifactor online authentication enterprise security software. Consumer Web sites using Bharosa's technologies include Wells Fargo & Co. and National City Corp. In total, the company estimates its software protects 27 million users. Other Bharosa customers are AudioTel, a supplier of software to banks, and I-flex solutions, an Indian financial services software vendor and an majority owned Oracle subsidiary. Founded in 2003, privately held Bharosa has its headquarters in Santa Clara, California. The company's name means "trust" in Hindi. Oracle was previously busy on the identity management front in 2005 buying up three companies -- Oblix, OctetString, and Thor -- for their technologies which the vendor then integrated into its security offerings. Â
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Opinion: The company&#39;s decision to keep per-processor licensing for upcoming multicore technology is a win for customers, but of more immediate licensing concern are grid, partitioning and utility computing.
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In a new post to her Oracle blog today, Alison Holloway shares the presentation she gave at this year's Melbourne Opensource Developers' Conference titled "Working with PHP and Oracle".   I don't think the organizers are going to post the presentations, so I wanted to make it available here.   The talk covers things like the free Oracle tools available, the OCI8 extension, connection management, improving performance, and some Oracle resources. You can grab the PDF download here.