Re: The price of doing business with IBM?

> Anyone know the Oracle 10g list price these days? Oracle list prices are published. Google is your friend. See: store.oracle.com or http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/pricelists.html Prices quoted are perpetual. The last link also has the term licensing details. For 3 years it's basically 50% of perpetual. Support is always based on the net perpetual, or a fixed cost number of incidental calls. Oracle Standard Edition One is $5800 per socket, independent of the number of cores in the socket. The limitation is that you can only license on up a two socket machine. Standard Edition is the same, with a limit up to 4 sockets, and it also includes RAC. Enterprise is prized per CPU, and we have core multipliers similar to IBM'S PVUs to get from number of cores back to number of sockets. But for the low end hardware, SE and SE1 is a great deal So for a dual core machine SE1 is 2x$5800 perpetual, or $5800 for a 3 year term I am not sure why there is a $6,900 cost for support in the benchmark, I suspect it represents 3 years of incident support rather than the actual support costs per above (which I calculate be 22% of net perpetual, or $2552). The prices in the TPC-C are all above board, and if in fact if is three years of incident support rather then the lower 24 hour support, they may indeed even get lower. Good catch Gumby :-)

> > The prices in the TPC-C are all above board, and if in fact if is three > years of incident support rather then the lower 24 hour support, they > may indeed even get lower. Good catch Gumby :-) > Hmm - while I think about it - isn't IBM charging an uplift for customers on 7.3 to go up to later versions of IDS ? Could it be possible that it's cheaper in software costs to migrate to Oracle SE1, at least on the low end ? Especially if wanting to go to the new really really fast hardware at the same time ? Methinks me sees a little Q4 safeswitch campaign :-) Maybe I could even use a quote or two from some long time Informix users > So IDS is dead from the get go. > > Looks like IBM isn't going to be cost competitive any time soon. Thanks again.

"Mark Townsend" <markbtownsend@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message news:49E53723.6040908@sbcglobal.net... > Oracle Standard Edition One is $5800 per socket, independent of the number > of cores in the socket. The limitation is that you can only license on up > a two socket machine. Standard Edition is the same, with a limit up to 4 > sockets, and it also includes RAC. Enterprise is prized per CPU, and we > have core multipliers similar to IBM'S PVUs to get from number of cores > back to number of sockets. But for the low end hardware, SE and SE1 is a > great deal As previously stated, then, what makes Informix disproportionally expensive in the quoted benchmark is the use of multi-core processors, because at the low end Oracle disregards the number of cores and focusses only on the number of processors, whereas IBM is consistent all the way through Express, Workgroup and Enterprise. The more cores the greater the disparity.

"Mark Townsend" <markbtownsend@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message news:AVaFl.13582$%54.7489@nlpi070.nbdc.sbc.com... > >> >> The prices in the TPC-C are all above board, and if in fact if is three >> years of incident support rather then the lower 24 hour support, they may >> indeed even get lower. Good catch Gumby :-) >> > > Hmm - while I think about it - isn't IBM charging an uplift for customers > on 7.3 to go up to later versions of IDS ? Could it be possible that it's > cheaper in software costs to migrate to Oracle SE1, at least on the low > end ? Especially if wanting to go to the new really really fast hardware > at the same time ? Yes, IBM continues to maintain that IDS 7 and IDS 9/10/11 are separate products, and charges a trade-up cost from 7. > Methinks me sees a little Q4 safeswitch campaign :-) Maybe, but IDS v7 to IDS 10 or 11 would, you must agree, be a trivial migration relative to IDS v7 to Oracle 10g or any other DBMS. So a customer might avoid the IBM trade-up charge but would likely incur increased migration charges in terms of testing and implementation. It would have to be a fairly sizeable licence cost saving to make it worthwhile, which implies bigger sites. And, as previously discussed, in bigger (ie Enterprise) sites, Oracle's price advantage is much less stark than at the low end.

> > Maybe, but IDS v7 to IDS 10 or 11 would, you must agree, be a trivial > migration relative to IDS v7 to Oracle 10g or any other DBMS. I would guess that the amount of testing would be the same. Especially if under a packaged app. It depends on how much of the 7.3 features are used, but I would guess that in the majority of cases actual database migration would be pretty simple. > It > would have to be a fairly sizeable licence cost saving to make it > worthwhile, which implies bigger sites. The price comparison won't work for bigger sites, as discounts will kick in. It's really the smaller sites with no leverage that would get the advantage. $70K list vs $11K list. Offer a 50% discount for customers switching, and it's over a 10:1 price differential. And then with around 20% support over 5 years - its a big saving. And it costs nothing to do from the sales side - it basically sells itself.

> From: markbtownsend@sbcglobal.net > Subject: Re: The price of doing business with IBM? > Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2009 20:41:17 -0700 > To: informix-list@iiug.org > > > > > > Maybe, but IDS v7 to IDS 10 or 11 would, you must agree, be a trivial > > migration relative to IDS v7 to Oracle 10g or any other DBMS. > > I would guess that the amount of testing would be the same. Especially > if under a packaged app. It depends on how much of the 7.3 features are > used, but I would guess that in the majority of cases actual database > migration would be pretty simple. > > > It > > would have to be a fairly sizeable licence cost saving to make it > > worthwhile, which implies bigger sites. > > The price comparison won't work for bigger sites, as discounts will kick > in. It's really the smaller sites with no leverage that would get the > advantage. > > $70K list vs $11K list. Offer a 50% discount for customers switching, > and it's over a 10:1 price differential. And then with around 20% > support over 5 years - its a big saving. And it costs nothing to do from > the sales side - it basically sells itself. > Thanks for making our point Mark. Hopefully Jerry K et al are watching this thread. If not, I'm sure that the more people attending the IIUG conference drives this exact price point home. To be fair, I did print out the data from the TPC-C benchmark and sorry Mark the price didn't add up. The $5800 listed was for both sockets which was 8 cores. The reason that the maintenance cost looks goofy is that they also included the Oracle OS's 3 year maintenance. Even still, its a 5:1 price difference, until you look at the cost of conversion so the real issue isn't that you could convince an Informix shop to migrate, but that you could convince a customer in the SMB space to go with Oracle over IDS. And thats the key. IBM wants the low end space w SMB customers. You're not going to win it unless you get price competitive. BTW, I know you aren't going to pay list, except that as Neil points out, BPs don't have the same ability to discount and on the low end, there is less incentive to discount. The same is true of IBM. Unless of course you're in their targeted 'white space' or you know how to play your IBM sales rep. ;-) So yeah, when you go to the IIUG conference, ask your IBM rep and the IBM execs what they are doing to make Informix affordable on the low end... -G _________________________________________________________________ Rediscover Hotmail®: Now available on your iPhone or BlackBerry http://windowslive.com/RediscoverHotmail?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Rediscover_Mobile1_042009

"Mark Townsend" <markbtownsend@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message news:49E5575D.4030700@sbcglobal.net... > >> > $70K list vs $11K list. Offer a 50% discount for customers switching, and > it's over a 10:1 price differential. And then with around 20% support over > 5 years - its a big saving. And it costs nothing to do from the sales > ide - it basically sells itself. It isn't a $70k IBM cost, though, as the trade-up cost is much less than the new-licence cost. And the "20% over five years" seems to have been plucked from the air ..!

Neil Truby wrote: > "Mark Townsend" <markbtownsend@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message > news:49E53723.6040908@sbcglobal.net... > >> Oracle Standard Edition One is $5800 per socket, independent of the >> number of cores in the socket. The limitation is that you can only >> license on up a two socket machine. Standard Edition is the same, with >> a limit up to 4 sockets, and it also includes RAC. Enterprise is >> prized per CPU, and we have core multipliers similar to IBM'S PVUs to >> get from number of cores back to number of sockets. But for the low >> end hardware, SE and SE1 is a great deal > > As previously stated, then, what makes Informix disproportionally > expensive in the quoted benchmark is the use of multi-core processors, > because at the low end Oracle disregards the number of cores and > focusses only on the number of processors, whereas IBM is consistent all > the way through Express, Workgroup and Enterprise. The more cores the > greater the disparity. > > What also makes the benchmark prices so nice is that they're using "term licensing". It means that the customer would be able to use the software only during 3 years. IBM AFAIK doesn't have this kind of licensing. This cuts the license costs in half. And it happens in other Oracle benchmarks. Now... I wonder how many customers are purchasing software for use only during 3 years? Probably after 3 years they're tired of Oracle and move to another RDBMS... Or not... But one thing is certain. It looks really nice in the benchmark report and the price per transaction, which is exactly the target of of low end benchmarks... If I'm mistaken, please correct me. Sales and prices aren't really my idea of fun... Regards. -- Fernando Nunes Portugal http://informix-technology.blogspot.com My email works... but I don't check it frequently...

"Fernando Nunes" <domusonline@gmail.com> wrote in message news:gs5qtj$vvu$1@news.motzarella.org... > What also makes the benchmark prices so nice is that they're using "term > licensing". It means that the customer would be able to use the software > only during 3 years. IBM AFAIK doesn't have this kind of licensing. This > cuts the license costs in half. I'm not an apologist for Gumby and I don't really want to be thought of as advocating all of his views. But on this one he's right; Oracle is much cheaper at the low end benchmark example cited. IBM's licensing is all based upon a perpetual licence. But I'm not sure how you infer that to mean that this halves IBM's price. The IBM price of course stays the same; I suppose you could argue that after 3 years you have to buy the Oracle licensing all over again whereas you don't with Oracle, and so it doubles the Oracle price ...

Neil Truby wrote: > "Fernando Nunes" <domusonline@gmail.com> wrote in message > news:gs5qtj$vvu$1@news.motzarella.org... > >> What also makes the benchmark prices so nice is that they're using >> "term licensing". It means that the customer would be able to use the >> software only during 3 years. IBM AFAIK doesn't have this kind of >> licensing. This cuts the license costs in half. > > I'm not an apologist for Gumby and I don't really want to be thought of > as advocating all of his views. But on this one he's right; Oracle is > much cheaper at the low end benchmark example cited. > IBM's licensing is all based upon a perpetual licence. But I'm not sure > how you infer that to mean that this halves IBM's price. The IBM price > of course stays the same; I suppose you could argue that after 3 years > you have to buy the Oracle licensing all over again whereas you don't > with Oracle, and so it doubles the Oracle price ... I have done a bad use of punctuation. What I meant to say is that the "term licensing" cuts the price of the software (Oracle) in the benchmarks in half. And this makes it nice for the benchmark. I just have some doubts that many customers would want to use this license scheme... And I have even more doubts that people looking at the benchmark take this into consideration. I believe this is not specifically mentioned on the report. And when I look at that I assume it's the usual "perpetual" license scheme. But this is usual in this kind of benchmarks. It used to be done with technical aspects, but it seems that we're into the commercial ones now. A real customer would pay double of what is showed in this benchmark (and others) for the database. And this would also have an impact on the price per transaction. Given the hardware costs it may not be a big difference, but it would surely be different. Finally, I'm not saying that for this hardware IBM is cheaper. I don't know the price list, and you're in a much better position to compare. Regards. -- Fernando Nunes Portugal http://informix-technology.blogspot.com My email works... but I don't check it frequently...

> From: neil.truby@ardenta.com > Subject: Re: The price of doing business with IBM? > Date: Thu, 16 Apr 2009 01:17:34 +0100 > To: informix-list@iiug.org > > "Fernando Nunes" <domusonline@gmail.com> wrote in message > news:gs5qtj$vvu$1@news.motzarella.org... > > > What also makes the benchmark prices so nice is that they're using "term > > licensing". It means that the customer would be able to use the software > > only during 3 years. IBM AFAIK doesn't have this kind of licensing. This > > cuts the license costs in half. > > I'm not an apologist for Gumby and I don't really want to be thought of as > advocating all of his views. But on this one he's right; Oracle is much > cheaper at the low end benchmark example cited. > IBM's licensing is all based upon a perpetual licence. But I'm not sure how > you infer that to mean that this halves IBM's price. The IBM price of > course stays the same; I suppose you could argue that after 3 years you have > to buy the Oracle licensing all over again whereas you don't with Oracle, > and so it doubles the Oracle price ... > LOL... That's funny. Gee thanks Neil. I don't know where Fernando gets the concept of a 'term maintenance' contract. According to the documents on the TPC.org it looks like Oracle's maintenance is an estimate is 3 1 year terms to get a 3 year 'TCO'. I think that I didn't raise this issue. I just asked the right question. Its unfortunate that there are a few IBMers who will try to spin the numbers rather than try to address the problem. But hey! I'm not selling IDS. That would be Ron, Neil, etc ... and IBM. Only IBM can change their pricing policies. But hey! What do I know? I just asked the right question... _________________________________________________________________ Rediscover Hotmail®: Get quick friend updates right in your inbox. http://windowslive.com/RediscoverHotmail?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Rediscover_Updates1_042009

"Fernando Nunes" <domusonline@gmail.com> wrote in message news:gs5uen$r8r$1@news.motzarella.org... > I have done a bad use of punctuation. > What I meant to say is that the "term licensing" cuts the price of the > software (Oracle) in the benchmarks in half. > > A real customer would pay double of what is showed in this benchmark (and > others) for the database. Yes, that's what Mark Townsend admitted. That takes the Oracle price up to $11,200 for the perpetual licence directly comparable to that of Informix. IBM Infomix's $71,000 doesn't look so bad now, does it? Er, hang on ........