Oracle Keys on SMBs

Oracle Corp. has introduced a new license scheme that company officials said will give smaller IT organizations a lower-cost point of entry to its database software.

Oracle Standard Edition One, available now, is essentially the Oracle9i DBMS limited so that it runs on only one processor. It is priced at $5,995 for an unlimited number of users or $195 per user for a minimum of five users. With the per-user pricing, a company could license the database for as little as about $1,000, said Jacqueline Woods, vice president of global licensing and pricing strategy at Oracle. Users will be able to upgrade to the 10g version of the Oracle database when it is available, which is slated for years end.

“This is not a scaled-down version of the Oracle Enterprise Edition or Standard Edition [databases],” Woods said. “You will have the same functionality; the limitation is that it [runs only on a] one-processor machine.”

Pricing for Oracle Standard Edition starts at $15,000; Enterprise Edition is priced at $40,000.

The Redwood Shores, Calif., company is only the latest database vendor to target smaller companies and departments in bigger companies. IBM this summer began shipping DB2 Express, a version of the Armonk, N.Y., companys DB2 Universal Database for smaller organizations. DB2 Express comes with a raft of wizards for ease of use.

While Oracle has not added any special tools to make it easier for smaller IT shops to run Oracle Standard Edition One, Woods said that when Oracle 10g becomes available, customers who choose to buy it under the Standard Edition One license will get the rapid installation and ease-of-management features inherent in Oracle 10g.