June 1998 It’s new to you – a 100-user price for Oracle on the HP 3000 If this item feels like a rerun, you can pass it up, but we think for a lot of 3000 customers it will be New to You, just like the comedies on US television this summer. After more than three years of scratching for it, we finally got a Oracle supplier to level with us on what the database costs if you were to have 100 users running it on an HP 3000. Adager’s Alfredo Rego first asked the question of Oracle at a database shootout in 1994, and the answer is easy to remember: $149,500, less whatever discounts you can get. That’s the list price, courtesy of HP supply channel partner Client Systems, people who have sold a lot of the 3000s that came along with Oracle installs. It really doesn’t do you much good to compare it to the lower cost of IMAGE/SQL included with an MPE/iX license (about $40,000 for 100 users, above the base cost of MPE/iX). That’s because the price of Oracle 7.3, like all Oracle products, is open for discounting just about all the time. Client Systems’ Bud Michael explained that you can get a discount of 30 to 60 percent off list depending on who you buy from (reseller or Oracle direct, and the latter is a steeper discount), when you buy (end of the Oracle quarter or fiscal year is great time) and how much you promise to buy over all time. Like if you order 100 concurrent seats and that’s it, you pay more per seat than if you say you’ll take a total of 200 seats, 100 now and 100 later. You can get Oracle cheaper when you order through HP’s specials, as low as $495 a seat in the latest sale, but the limit is 25 seats’ worth, and your Oracle had to be New to You. Copyright 1998 The 3000 NewsWire. All rights reserved