Oracle mimics Microsoft's per socket pricing
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Low-end love Oracle has tossed customers a Microsoft-like bone by loosening up its software licensing restrictions for low-end servers running on multi-core chips.â¦
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Oracle&#39;s new quarterly security-patch schedule departs from its monthly schedule, which Microsoft also uses. By George V. Hulme.
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UPDATED: Oracle (Quote, Chart) has upped its offer for PeopleSoft (Quote, Chart) to $24 per share, in what it called its final bid for the elusive enterprise applications company it has been trying to acquire since June 2003.
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TechWeb - Overstock.com is able to shift work among clusters with Oracle's 10g database.
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Facing Microsoft pressure and new multicore chips, Oracle has quietly cut prices database prices for some lower-end servers, News.com has learned.
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Get a close-up look at Microsoft's new consumer server.
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Computer Associates introduces usage-based pricing model for mainframe software.
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(InfoWorld) - Oracle has increased the price it is willing to pay for an additional stake in i-flex solutions, a vendor of financial software in Mumbai, India. The move follows a period of sharp increases in company valuations on India's stock market, and Oracle may have felt that increasing its offer was necessary to make its offer more attractive for i-flex shareholders, analysts said. Oracle, of Redwood Shores, California, said Thursday said it has increased its offer price to 2,100 Indian rupees ($47) per share, including interest. The company also said that it has raisedÂ to about 35 percent the number of shares it has agreed to buy in the pending open offer to i-flex shareholders. The new open offer price is a 42 percent premium to the 1,475 rupees per share that Oracle first offered, and a 20 per cent premium to i-flex's closing stock price on Thursday of 1,751 rupees. Indian stock markets are booming, and investor expectations are high, said a financial analyst who declined to be named. Oracle may have not found sufficient support for the offer at its earlier price, he said. The price of i-flex's shares has risen by over 52 percent in the last six months. Oracle informed the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) in September that it intended to acquire an additional 20 percent of the equity of i-flex. It already holds a 55 percent stake in the company. Oracle would be paying about $531 million for the additional stake. Oracle subsequently delayed the open date of the offer from Nov. 6 to Dec. 4. In an statement to the BSE on Friday, i-flex said that Oracle had increased the number of shares it wanted to purchase in the open offer from the earlier 16.63 million to 28.39 million, representing 34.14 percent of the emerging voting capital. An i-flex spokeswoman declined to comment on the new offer. Oracle will be paying about $1.3 billion for the additional equity if its offer sails through. The open offer closes on Dec. 23.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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BEA Systems made good Sunday on its promise to let a 5 p.m. Pacific Time&#160;deadline expire on Oracle&#39;s $17-per-share offer to buy the company.The enterprise software maker&#39;s board of directors had already said publicly that Oracle&#39;s bid, which amounts to $6.7 billion, was too low.&#160;BEA instead named a price of $21 per share, which works out to roughly $8.3 billion.Oracle issued a brief statement Sunday that was terse in tone, but nonetheless did not rule out a future bid: &quot;The BEA shareholders should not assume that Oracle will renew its $17 per share offer in the future. Over time many things can change: BEA&#39;s business might materially weaken, the stock market can fall further from its recent record highs, or Oracle may have committed its capital elsewhere.&quot;A BEA spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment.Oracle has coveted BEA&#39;s customer base and share of the middleware market, but company officials called BEA&#39;s demand &quot;impossibly high.&quot;While Oracle&#39;s next move remains to be seen, other companies may look to acquire BEA.Burc Oral, president of the New England BEA User Group, brought up some oft-mentioned names -- HP, S- but said perhaps an unlikely suitor will emerge for the firm. &quot;I have always thought that stackwise, HP is a good candidate. I was also thinking about a sleeping giant, like Computer Associates. They have no overlap.&quot;Of course, there is still the possibility that Oracle will end up buying BEA after all, and perhaps soon.BEA&#39;s largest shareholder, billionaire Carl Icahn, has demanded the board allow shareholders to consider Oracle&#39;s bid.Icahn, who holds more than 58 million shares of BEA stock, said in a statement that he has filed suit in Delaware to force an annual shareholder meeting &quot;before any scorched earth transactions (such as stock issuances, asset sales, acquisitions or similar occurrences) take place at BEA, other than transactions that are approved by shareholders.&quot;The investor also accused BEA&#39;s board of intending &quot;to find ways to derail a sale&quot; and maintain control of the company.Icahn said BEA can avoid litigation if it conducts an auction sale, allowing shareholders to consider offers from the highest bidder.An Oracle purchase would prompt an uncertain future for BEA customers, according to Oral.&quot;I think the support and maintenance will be honored for at least three years [if Oracle buys BEA],&quot; he said. &quot;The issue is, what is the product development that is going to happen?&quot;Change wouldn&#39;t occur immediately under Oracle, but would subsequently do so in dramatic fashion, he predicted. &quot;For a year, BEA is going to sail as it is. Then there is going to be a major consolidation in the product space.&quot;Prakash Malani, a BEA user from the Los Angeles, California area, said sale talks come at a time when BEA&#39;s fortunes are middling.&quot;I believe they have excellent products that compete very well in the market place. However, their products are being commoditized, innovation is slowing down, and their big bet on SOA [service-oriented architecture] has yet to be paid off,&quot; Malani wrote in an e-mail message. &quot;They have missed [the] mark on some technologies like RIA (Rich Internet Application) and their top talent is being poached by companies like Google.&quot;
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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 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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The rapidly growing software company gets the price it wants from HP.
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ParAccel, a new company based in San Diego, this week released a database for midsize companies that combines a number of BI-oriented features at a low price point.The company is targeting the middle of the midmarket, not smaller businesses, according to vice president of marketing Kim Stanick. &quot;You have to have a certain amount of data before our product becomes compelling for you,&quot; she said.The software does not provide radical new technology, but ParAccel is touting its database&#39;s columnar orientation and MPP (massively parallel processing) capabilities. The company argues that columnar databases are more effective for&#160;BI applications because users can query just the desired columns of a given row, saving bandwidth.&quot;That itself is a nice product set, especially with the price point,&quot; Stanick said.ParAccel is offering the database as a software package or incorporated into a hardware appliance. It can also be deployed as a &quot;drop in&quot; accelerator for existing SQL Server and Oracle databases. The company said the database is compatible with all major brands of hardware.A number of licensing options are available. All-in-memory systems cost $1,000 per gigabyte, beginning at 100GB. Disk-based systems cost $40,000 per node plus $10,000 per terabyte, starting at five nodes. Subscriptions cost $5,000 a month and up.ParAccel counts some notable names among its management team. One of Oracle&#39;s co-founders, Bruce Scott, is vice president of engineering.The startup originally positioned its product as an accelerator for SQL Server, but in response to market interest widened its focus to include data warehousing and Oracle&#39;s platform. This week&#39;s announcement doubled as the official company launch for ParAccel, which joins an increasingly crowded market for data warehousing.ParAccel also announced benchmarking figures for its database running on Sun Fire X4100 and Blade 6000 servers. According to the company, the combination set TPC-H (ad-hoc, decision support) records for performance in the 1TB category. Sun and ParAccel are also partnering on a data warehousing product.
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(InfoWorld) - As part of its ongoing bid to target telecommunications providers, Oracle took the wraps off Virtual PBX, an important new piece of its planned service delivery platform (SDP). Generally available Monday, Virtual PBX (public branch exchange) is one of the deliverables Oracle committed to back in April when the database, applications and middleware vendor firstÂ laid out its SDP plans. Those in the telecommunications industry are coming under increasing pressure to rapidly adapt their businesses to mirror the ongoing convergence of data, voice, and video services. To cope with the speed of change, carriers, network operators and systems integrators are moving their IT operations to a SOA (service-oriented architecture) approach. Oracle's SDP aims to offer telecommunications developers a single programming environment based on Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) so they can build new services quickly as well as integrate and manage those offerings with existing services. An operator-hosted PBX service for small, medium and larger enterprises, Virtual PBX includes functionality to enable the handling of incoming calls without requiring major changes to the telecom network's underlying architecture as well as the ability to offer specific bundles of telecom features to individual customers. Back in April, Oracle sketched out its SDP strategy, explaining that some pieces of the platform already exist like its Fusion middleware and its Oracle 10g relational database, while pledging to release others, including Virtual PBX, later in the year. As part of SDP, Oracle is expanding its middleware so that users can access newer mobile, voice services and enterprise applications through traditional communication networks and networks based on Internet Protocol multimedia subsystem also known as IMS and VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol). Oracle has yet to commit to an exact time for when SDP will be complete.
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At first glance, paying $13 or $14 for  a hard-wired Internet laptop connection in a hotel room might  seem expensive.
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In a move that could help small and medium-size businesses save money, telecom carrier XO Communications has rolled out a new pricing model for VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) services based on the bandwidth a business uses, instead of the number of lines.The pricing model, announced Wednesday along with expansion of XO&#39;s VoIP offerings, allows U.S. business customers to set a price based on an IP port speed ranging from 1.5Mbps to 45Mbps, instead of the number of lines used. There are additional costs for long-distance calling plans and additional features.&quot;With IP, voice is just another application over the IP backbone,&quot; said Nic Jackson, XO&#39;s director of voice and converged services. &quot;When we put a T1 [connection] out to the customer premise, it really doesn&#39;t matter to us, or to the customer really, how they use that T1, as long as they have enough bandwidth to manage their voice and data needs. Why would we price differently for a voice channel vs. a data channel? It just doesn&#39;t make sense in this new IP world.&quot;Pricing starts at about $400 to $550 a month for 1.5Mbps service, depending on location and based on a three-year contract, Jackson said. A basic long-distance calling plan would cost an additional $60 a month. XO also offers one-year and five-year contracts.The new pricing model could cut costs for companies, particularly small and medium-size businesses, said Lisa Pierce, an analyst with Forrester Research. For a T1 line, a business with volume of about 54 calls per hour would be necessary for the XO pricing to make sense, she said.&quot;It looks like a pretty good deal,&quot; Pierce said.However, businesses interested in the plan should inquire whether the service is being provided over XO&#39;s own backbone or whether the carrier is buying access from others, Pierce said. In some cases, the rented network access can cause outages, she said.In addition, businesses should have a good idea about their current and future voice use before signing a contract based on bandwidth, Pierce recommended. &quot;They need to really have a handle on their traffic to do that,&quot; she said. &quot;And a lot of companies don&#39;t.&quot;XO will help customers determine their bandwidth needs, Jackson said. The bandwidth pricing can help simplify customer decisions about what kind of calling services they need, she said.In addition, XO, in Herndon, Virginia, announced it has expanded two of its VoIP offerings.The company has launched its XO IP Flex service, which allows customers to use traditional PBXes or multiline, key telephone systems to connect to XO&#39;s VoIP services. The new service, which replaces XO&#39;s XOptions Flex offering, includes unlimited site-to-site calling, voicemail and dynamic bandwidth allocation, allowing full use of the IP circuit for data when voice lines are idle. IP Flex also offers bandwidth of up to 10M bps, compared to 3M bps under the old service, Jackson said.XO also announced the nationwide availability of its IP SIP VoIP service, which delivers voice and data services to businesses with IP PBX systems over a single connection. XO launched IP SIP in October in six U.S. markets.&quot;What this means is a much broader portfolio than we had, say 18 months ago,&quot; Jackson said.
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Oracle has released the Windows version of its flagship 11g database, a few months after the company&#160;shipped the Linux version. Along with assorted performance improvements, the Windows release features beefed-up integration with Microsoft&#39;s platform on both the administrative and developer levels.Administrators can now execute backup and recovery jobs with Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service, according to Oracle. The database also features tight links with Microsoft&#39;s Visual Studio integrated development environment, the company said.Even as Oracle adds richer support for the Windows platform into 11g -- a result of a working partnership between the two companies -- it is competing vigorously with Microsoft in the database market. Microsoft is set to launch&#160;SQL Server 2008&#160;in February.Other new features in 11g include:-- Oracle Real Application Testing. This enables customers to use real-life production workloads to test the effect of potential changes within IT environments, before actually conducting the change, the company says.-- Oracle Advanced Compression, which can compress data by three times or more, according to the company.-- Oracle Total Recall, a system for querying historical changes to data.Pricing information was not provided.