Oracle Makes Aggressive Price Cuts

The promotion, launched late last month, is touted on Oracle's site and refers interested parties to a toll-free number.

At the Oracle9i database launch in June 2001, the company switched to the widely accepted per-processor pricing model, charging $40,000 per CPU for the enterprise database plus an additional $20,000 per CPU for Real Application Cluster (RAC) capabilities. The promotion thus cuts RAC prices to $10,000 per CPU.

Oracle Chairman and CEO Larry Ellison has repeatedly stressed that the clustering capability of Oracle's database products will bring mainframe-class computing functionality to commodity hardware running a variety of operating systems, including Linux.

Oracle E-business discounts will be applied after the promotional discount, but otherwise this deal cannot be combined with other promotions, according to Oracle's site.

While competitors were quick to characterize this as a fire sale with Oracle reacting to price pressure from Microsoft SQL Server and IBM's DB2, others said the promotion is proactive and smart.

"This should really help move the Linux/RAC effort," said Rich Niemiec, CEO of TUSC, a Lombard, Ill., Oracle partner. "Our surveys show that a large audience is interested in RAC. Every application can take advantage of it because it gives you better scalability and availability."