back to article IBM woos Oracle punters smarting from price hikes

IBM is trying to exploit a series of Oracle software and hardware price hikes in recent years to woo firms into using its database appliances. Following an OpenWorld week that has seen Oracle CEO Larry Ellison fire a couple of salvos at rivals, IBM has lifted the covers off a Stop, Think and Save migration programme. "The …

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  1. Victor 2
    Meh

    Really?....

    That's their answer?... Price?

    Ellison dismembered them all these days and their only answer is Oracle's price?

    That's a fail in my book.

  2. Mark 110

    Happens

    Where I work (2nd or 3rd - not sure - biggest FMCG manufacturer in the world) are in the process of migrating all there SAP databases from Oracle to DB2. Oracle just charge too much. This will happen if people are prepared to put the work in.

  3. Erik4872
    WTF?

    Hmm...

    Not quite sure how to react to this one...an offer of pricing relief from the King of Vendor Lock-In?

    That said, customers might want to think about that a bit. It's pretty obvious that Oracle is turning the Sun hardware business into a set of (really expensive) database appliances, and Solaris into a boot loader for the database and middleware.

    Everyone I've talked to who has Sun hardware is getting off of it ASAP, because they see where this is going. Almost all their workloads that aren't 100% married to Solaris are being moved to Linux or other OSes. I'm not exactly sure IBM's the right vendor to run to for this. But, it shows you the feelings of the IT industry now about Oracle controlling a huge vertical stack.

  4. BasevaInc
    Angel

    It's true - http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/info/breakfree/index.html?ovl=true

    take that ORACLE!

  5. Kebabbert
    Terminator

    IBM is getting desperate.

    Ouch. When you do things for free, or cut your prices heavily, it is not a health sign. A company charges money for the products because they can. If they can not, then they lower the price or even do things for free. Which is a very bad sign.

    To do things for free shows you are not confident in the value of your products. This is normally a sign of desperation. I never thought IBM were so desperate they had to do things for free. Bad sign.

    IBM POWER6 servers costed 5-10x more than x86 servers - but people bought them anyway.

    IBM POWER7 servers costs 3x more than x86. IBM has lowered the prices.

    IBM POWER8 servers will cost as much as x86? IBM can not charge high prices anymore. This is a BAD sign for a company. And now IBM even does things for free. This tells me IBM does not have confidence in IBM's products.

    http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/10/ibm-offers-oracle-customers-a-sweet-trade-in-deal-during-oracle-openworld.ars?comments=1#comments-bar

    1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
      Alert

      RE: IBM is getting desperate

      We are predominantly an Oracle and M$ SQL shop when it comes to databases in production, and the split is the departmental stuff is almost all M$ and the enterprise bits are almost all Oracle. Years ago it was just about all Oracle, a quick example of how Oracle's market is being eaten from below. I used to think a lot of the M$ SQL would be replaced by MySQL but that simply hasn't happened.

      The enterprise bits are run to a "two vendor" policy - every bit of the hardware and software stack is tested and signed off on at least two vendors' products, so we can switch virtually overnight if required. Our backup choice for the enterprise database has been DB2, though (AFAIK) we don't have any DB2 in production. When it comes to experience, up to now all our DBAs are Oracle first, DB2 second.

      So, all sounds pretty good for Oracle, no? Well, we just advertised for two DB2 senior admins, preferably with Oracle migration experience..... Thanks, Larry.

      1. Allison Park
        Go

        Moving to DB2

        We have plans to move our SAP environment to DB2. The licenses we free up there will help avoid buying any more Oracle.

    2. Nate Amsden

      IBM does x86 too

      Maybe you haven't heard that IBM is the #1 or #2 player in x86 as well if that is what the customer wants. Maybe you haven't heard that Oracle has their own processor as well that is not x86. Larry has even come out and said he wouldn't care if their share of x86 servers drops to 0 because they make no money on them.

      The underlying hardware cost is usually a small minority of the purchase in these cases, when your talking 10s of thousands of dollars per socket(starting price) for the software, which is what IBM is pushing here.

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