Oracle simplifies pricing model
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Four basic licensing models will be available for all Oracle products, including J.D. Edwards, PeopleSoft and Siebel applications.
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Despite having revenues of around $70 million to $85 million, MySQL commanded an impressive $1 billion price tag in today's acquisition by database giant Oracle.
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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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OCTOBER 08, 2004 (REUTERS) - Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison said today that his company has talked about revising its current $21-per-share offer to buy rival PeopleSoft Inc.
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Oracle has rejected&#160;BEA Systems&#39; proposed purchase price of $21 per share, calling it &quot;impossibly high&quot; for Oracle or any other company to pay.In a letter to BEA&#39;s board dated Oct. 25, Oracle again urged the company to accept its offer of $17 per share, an amount that Oracle said it was &quot;unwilling to increase.&quot;&quot;The $21 per share price is a multiple of nearly eleven times BEA&#39;s last twelve months&#39; reported maintenance revenues,&quot; wrote Oracle President Charles Phillips. &quot;Nobody would seriously consider paying that kind of multiple for a software company with shrinking new license sales.&quot;He noted that Oracle was the only company making an offer for BEA. &quot;Apparently no other companies think that BEA is worth $17 per share, let alone $21 per share,&quot; Philips wrote.Oracle again urged BEA to put its offer to a shareholder vote.&#160;Oracle&#39;s bid of $17 per share&#160;values BEA at about $6.7 billion. A price of $21 per share would value it at $8.3 billion.Oracle said it had an obligation to its own shareholders to &quot;exercise price discipline when evaluating acquisition opportunities.&quot; It reminded BEA of its&#160;deadline of Sunday evening&#160;to accept the offer, after which it will &quot;move on&quot; and consider other acquisitions.Oracle made its surprise bid for BEA on Oct. 12, hoping to strengthen its line of middleware products and grow its customer base. BEA, which had been under pressure from investor Carl Icahn to sell, quickly rejected the offer as too low, and on Thursday came back with its suggested higher price. Oracle&#39;s offer &quot;significantly undervalues BEA&quot; and is not in the best interests of BEA&#39;s shareholders, it said on Thursday.BEA officials weren&#39;t available for comment on Oracle&#39;s latest letter.&#160;
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Aggregator says it expects flat-rate pricing to simplify budgeting for enterprises and to increase usage of hotspots. By Mobile Pipeline News.
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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.Oracle&#39;s licensing practices have been maligned as overly confusing and unfair. But Eliot Arlo Colon, president of Miro Consulting, an independent firm in Fords, N.J., didn&#39;t get into specifics about particular policies, instead organizing a webinar around four categories: compliance, discounts, ongoing annual support costs, and terms and conditions.&quot;When I look at e-mail subject lines, these are the things we get hit with,&quot; Colon said.&quot;Compliance is the foundation. Without it, nothing else matters,&quot; he said, adding that it is &quot;not a gray area. Either you&#39;re compliant or you&#39;re not. ... If you consider areas [of use] gray, or your vendor considers areas gray, you should be concerned.&quot;Companies should self-audit their licenses twice a year, and it should be a &quot;thorough review,&quot; not a couple of mass e-mails, he said: &quot;It&#39;s definitely more of a bear than most people would anticipate.&quot;A third party should review the audit, and the company must possess a &quot;stated and defendable&quot; position on gray areas, he added. It is also wise to get assumptions confirmed in writing: &quot;If it&#39;s not stated in your agreement that you have that right, chances are you do not have that right,&quot; he said.Oracle vigorously defends its intellectual property, according to Colon. &quot;You always have to assume an audit is only 30 days away,&quot; he said. &quot;We&#39;ve worked with companies that say &#39;We&#39;re a strategic partner, we&#39;re in the Oracle top 50,&#39; and then they&#39;re audited.&quot;Colon offered a range of advice concerning license cost. While Oracle and other vendors tend to offer better deals at certain times of the year, customers shouldn&#39;t be easily tempted by a low price, he said: &quot;Waiting until a vendor&#39;s end-of-year, end-of-quarter may not be in your best interest if it&#39;s changing your business process. ... Everyone wants to get a good deal, but discount isn&#39;t the whole game. It&#39;s total cost of ownership.&quot;To that end, organizations should take a close look at their existing annual support costs, he said: &quot;You may find that your support is a lot better than you thought, or you might find products that you&#39;re supporting and not using. ... or that Oracle has acquired half the software you&#39;ve got and now it can be supported under one envelope.&quot;In fact, enterprises should review their annual support spending at least twice per year, Colon argued.IT shops should also seek to rework any complex and ambiguous language in license contracts; determine how globalization and consolidation has altered their company&#39;s licensing needs; mull the ramifications of licensing among mobile workers; and ensure they have collected all proofs of purchases for storage in an asset management repository, Colon said. His company advises enterprise-software customers of companies, including Oracle and Microsoft.When renewal time comes, companies should weigh whether it makes more sense to renew the existing pact or formulate a new one, according to Colon. &quot;Businesses are very dynamic. If you have an agreement signed four years ago, chances are it doesn&#39;t work for you today,&quot; he said.Firms must also ensure they and Oracle are working from the same set of terms and conditions, Colon warned: &quot;You want to make sure you&#39;re protected -- believe me, Oracle is going to make sure they&#39;re protected.&quot;
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This fourth priority&#39;s main focus has been improving or obtaining CRM and ERP software for the past year and a half. Oracle has begun selling business applications software to small companies in conjunction
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In a departure from the current flat fee, the company will experiment with a new pricing structure that charges customers based on how much data they download.
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Computer Associates will offer an on-demand pricing model for many of its mainframe applications. The licensing program uses what CA calls &quot;measured-workload pricing&quot; based on actual system
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Oracle Corp. is finally bringing to the North American market its Oracle E-Business Suite Special Edition, a midmarket-aimed package of pre-installed, preconfigured software from its 11i suite of business applications.
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BEA Systems said Thursday it is prepared to discuss a sale of the company to Oracle Corp. and other potential suitors at a price of $21 per share.
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With a major hurdle out of the way but a few more tough ones up ahead, Oracle&#39;s bid to buy PeopleSoft could boil down to one question: What price is right?
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(InfoWorld) - Oracle Corp. has shipped a new version of Portal's billing and revenue management software after winning a hard-fought battle to acquire Portal earlier this year. Portal's software is designed to let communications and media companies bill and manage a range of services including wireline and wireless phones, broadband, cable, VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol), IP television, music and video. The application can handle both prepaid and postpaid services as well as different billing plans such as family and corporate calling plans. Now known as Oracle Communications Billing and Revenue Management, Oracle made version 7.3 of the Portal software generally available Monday. The focus of the new release is improved systems management capabilities including a real-time centralized operations management console and a performance optimization dashboard, according to Jennifer Kyriakakis, director of product marketing at Oracle. The new version has strong ties into Hewlett-Packard Co.'s OpenView systems management software and can also hook into consoles from other systems management software vendors, she said. Acquiring Portal was a strategic move on Oracle's behalf. It was part of the vendor's endeavors to build up domain expertise across a number of vertical industries, said Bhaskar Gorti, a senior vice president at Oracle. Previously at Portal, he now heads Oracle's newly formed communications global business unit, which houses what was Portal. In creating the new business unit, Oracle intends to emulate the approach it took last year when it set up a new retail business unit based on its purchase of retail management software vendor Retek, he added. Oracle first announced plans to purchase Portal for around US$220 million in April butÂ had to renew its tender offer for the company twice in the wake of some Portal shareholder opposition to the deal. "I was a little surprised it took so long; we all were," Gorti said. "But we were very confident that we'd done the necessary due diligence and that the deal would get completed." Oracle officially took over Portal in late June and completed the buy in early July having acquired more than 88 percent of Portal's outstanding stock. Oracle has since purchased the remaining stock and now owns 100 percent of Portal, Gorti said. The database and applications vendor is working on integrating Portal's billing and revenue management into its ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications as well as tightening the existing ties between Portal and the CRM (customer relationship management) software Oracle acquired through the purchase of Siebel. Definitely on the agenda is a plan to integrate Portal's software with Oracle's General Ledger (GL) application, Gorti said. Portal already integrates with the GL of Oracle's main applications rival SAP AG. Although Portal has focused on the telecommunications and media industries, Gorti confirmed that Oracle is looking to expand the use of the software to other vertical industries, though he declined to name which ones. Oracle intends to provide more details on its planned road map for the Portal products and technology later this month at its OpenWorld user conference in San Francisco, Gorti said. Â
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Oracle (nasdaq: ORCL - news - people ) will report fiscal first-quarter results. Analysts polled by Thomson First Call expect quarterly earnings of 9 cents per share on revenue of $2.
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Storage tiers tend to align neatly with the product offerings of an incumbent vendor with the assumption of a cheaper total cost of ownership will result. But when complexity is factored into a TCO model, the cost savings rational may be significantly reduced if not eliminated.
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Oracle continues to snap up smaller software companies even while it battles to acquire middleware vendor BEA. On Wednesday Oracle said it had agreed to buy Interlace Systems, which makes operations planning software, for an undisclosed price.Interlace sells software that pulls together data from different sources and allows companies to run &quot;what if&quot; scenarios on the data to determine the outcome of changes they make.Its Integrated Business Planning product has been aimed mainly at manufacturing companies. Customers include Seagate Technologies, the disk drive maker, and Eaton, which makes electrical systems and power systems.Oracle said it would integrate the software with its Enterprise Performance Management System, including the&#160;Hyperion software it bought earlier this year, to give customers better financial and operational planning tools. It won&#39;t discuss a timeline for integration until the merger closes, which is expected to happen next month.Oracle will also continue to offer Interlace&#39;s products on a standalone basis and continue to work with databases and application servers from other vendors, including Microsoft&#39;s SQL Server, IBM&#39;s WebSphere, and SAP&#39;s NetWeaver, according to an FAQ on Oracle&#39;s Web site.Oracle said it would retain Interlace staff with &quot;significant domain expertise&quot; in its products.Interlace is the 10th acquisition Oracle has announced this year and the 36th since 2005. The company said it has become fast and efficient at integrating them all, with specially assigned staff and &quot;proven templates and processes for repeatable success in integration.&quot;On Oct. 12,&#160;Oracle offered $6.7 billion to buy middleware vendor BEA.&#160;BEA called the offer too low, but Oracle on Tuesday said it was a &quot;generous&quot; offer and&#160;gave BEA until Sunday to accept.