An aggressive new marketing thrust by Oracle South Africa has led to price reductions on its database products by up to 45% and greater sales incentives for its channel partners.
Marc Gower, Oracle`s channel marketing manager, says the new uniform structure will remove marketplace perceptions that Oracle`s offerings are high priced.
"Our new pricing model brings Oracle`s database technology to a significantly wider market and address Oracle partners` alignment with e-business developments," he says.
"Internet computing has driven the popularity of our database to an all-time high. Lowering prices will increase the overall size of the database market in South Africa and give smaller companies access to modern business technology."
Gower says previously Oracle`s pricing was based on a single price per license option. Street pricing was then up to each reseller partner and varied from one sales scenario to another.
"Now, in a groundbreaking move for database software, pricing is based on the processing power of the system it serves - regardless of the user population and whether the application users are Internet or public extranet users, or an internal or external community," says Gower.
"Oracle`s approach is based on the assumption that companies will adjust their CPU power in line with the size of the population they service and hence the value they draw from the software."
Gower says that, through reseller partners, Oracle will also be offering increased flexibility and choice of investment options. "In addition to perpetual licenses Oracle is now making available two or four year license terms, costing 35% and 65% respectively of the perpetual fee.
"These licenses may be appropriate for companies who use Oracle technology on a project basis, licensing what they need, when they need it and avoiding lengthy price negotiations."
According to Oracle, its database prices are effectively reduced even further by making some separately-priced optional features standard.
Two key Internet options - interMedia, a text and multimedia search engine, and JServer, an integrated Java interpreter - are now included with Oracle 8i at no additional cost.
In addition, the price for seven-day-per-week and 24-hour-a-day support is reduced and standardised at 7% of the software price.
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