Why pay more...and get less?

Oracle Charges More...

• 47% increase in the license price³ of WebLogic Server Enterprise Edition since Oracle acquired BEA – 3.5x the increase in license price of WebSphere Application Server ND (WAS ND) over the same period.

• 74% more for 1^st year license and support¹

• 57% more to renew support beyond the 1^st year¹

...And Provides Less

• Oracle charges for backup servers², IBM doesn't charge for backup servers
  - Standby servers#
  - Failover servers# when failover is 10+ days
  - Remote mirroring servers#

• Oracle charges for all CPUs on a server even if "soft-partitioned"⁴ (e.g. with VMware), IBM charges only for CPUs utilized by WAS ND

• Additional costs for features that are included in WAS ND but not in WebLogic Server Enterprise Edition such as Web cache⁵, Session initiation Protocol (SIP)⁶ and the SCA programming model⁷

IBM WebSphere Smart SOA Application Foundation delivers the innovation and performance essential to cost-effectively build, deploy and manage robust SOA applications.

Results based on current SPECjAppServer2004⁹ benchmark show IBM WebSphere Application Server as the price / performance leader¹⁰. Oracle's claims about price / performance leadership are based on 7 years old tests performed using benchmarks⁸ which have no relevance to today's IT infrastructure.

Sources:

1. Oracle technology global price list (PDF, 157KB), section II pages 3-5. Effective: 1 Oct 2009

2. Oracle software investment guide (PDF, 2.46MB), page 20-21. Effective: 28 May 2009

3. Oracle hikes middleware license fees 20 Jun 2008

4. Oracle software investment guide – partitioning (PDF, 112KB) page 1 Effective: 30 Sept 2009

5. Included in WebLogic Suite*. See Oracle data sheet - Feature Matrix Oracle WebLogic Enterprise Edition (PDF, 248.7KB) 2009

6. Included in Oracle Communications Converged Application Server**

7. Included in SOA Suite***. See Oracle White Paper - Oracle SOA Suite (PDF, 547.7KB) 11g Jan 2009

8. SPECjAppServer2001 and SPECjAppServer2002 benchmarks

9. SPECjAppServer is a trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC).

10. Based on taking the ratio of list price for the application server software used in the benchmark and the throughput of the benchmark result for the Oracle and IBM on comparable hardware.

*WebLogic Suite processor license: $45k¹
**Oracle Communications Converged Application Server: price not avail.
***Soa Suite processor license: $57.5k¹
# WebLogic Server Enterprise Edition processor license: $25k¹

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