R E L A T E D C O N T E N T

Oracle sweetens 11i upgrade with fixed costs

Ellison and co attempt to convince sceptical 10.7 users

Gareth Morgan, vnunet.com 22 Jan 2003

Oracle has revealed plans to woo customers who are yet to upgrade to its 11i applications by offering predictable management and support costs.

The business software giant yesterday detailed its plans for offering a fixed price, outsourced installation, called All-In-One, at its user conference in San Diego.

The offer will provide IT managers with a complete price for the deployment and ongoing management of Oracle's 11i business application suite.

The software can be hosted onsite, at Oracle's data centres or by a third party.

Chief executive Larry Ellison told delegates that estimating the cost of implementing enterprise systems is almost impossible.

He claimed that only Oracle would set a price for installing and running the software before the deal was signed.

"We'll tell you in advance what the total cost of ownership will be. We will guarantee it," he said.

But to make this offer attractive, Oracle will need to control the complexity of the implementations, according to analysts.

Ron Wohl, executive vice president of application development at Oracle, claimed that few customisations were needed.

"The majority of our customers are working with 11i. And they have done it with extraordinarily few customisations," he said.

In separate announcements, Oracle indicated that it would be updating its Daily Business Intelligence suite and portal software.

Daily Business Intelligence 5, which eliminates the need to run data warehouses separately from transactional databases, will be released later this year. A pilot version will be available to customers from next month.

Improvements to Oracle's portal software, part of its 9iAS application server, will make it easier for users to customise their own portal, freeing IT staff from the task.

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