I am sure others have beaten this horse before, but I just have to take a whack at it.
Oracle, ESRI and others license their server-side technology on the basis of dollars-per-processing-unit, usually in the form of Constant * NumberOfCores * Price. For example, the base price for Oracle Enterprise (which you need to do high-end processing, like, say, computing a buffer (*snort*)) is 0.5 * NumberOfCore * $40,000.
OK, time for the quiz-show section of our show: Let's say you buy yourself some Oracle, and start using it. You find a particular use case that is slow, but important to you. You call up your Oracle representative, what will his answer be: (a) we'll make it faster or (b) you need more processing power. Remember, this is not a trick question, and he does earn commissions on sales.
Take it up a level. From a strategic financial point of view, all R&D dollars spent on on performance improvements actually constitute a double cost: the cost of doing the development; and, the cost of lost revenue due to fewer upgrades. If I am the CEO, do I encourage my managers to spend money on performance tweaks, which will reduce upgrade revenue, or on new features, which will drive new sales?
Friday, June 08, 2007
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4 comments:
I think you're estimating a bit low on the cost to calculate a buffer (ok, network and topology support too).
Enterprise + Spatial works out to about $60k CDN/processor, or about $240k for one of the now-standard dual quad-core machines. Heck, you can't even run the low cost SE One (with Locator) on one of these.
Low- and no-cost options will be eating into Oracle's market share something fierce.
The quad-core processors also bring into sharp relief the difference in pricing models between Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition.
As I read it, Standard Edition is now licensed per socket, not per core multiple. Therefore, if you can get by with just Standard Edition (Locator) the licence cost might be justifiable at 2 x USD15k (per socket) = USD30k per server.
However, if you then need to upgrade to Enterprise plus Spatial on the same server you are looking at 8 cores x 0.5 multiple x (USD40k + USD20k) per processor = USD240k per server at list price.
I recently costed Enterprise Edition licences for a high availability platform that we're building using 4 x dual processor quad core boxes, plus a smaller test server. Total cost was something like AUD2.2 million over 5 years, and that didn't include Spatial.
It goes beyond price. No matter what the price, the fact that the cost is tied to your hardware means that the more hardware they use, the more money they get. It actually makes business sense for version X+1 to be slower than version X. The development team could improve the corporate bottom line by inserting sleep() calls in key bits of code.
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