Executive vice president Chuck Rozwat has said that Oracle is going through a consideration of what the model is for pricing products running on multi-core systems.
He categorized recent comments made by Oracle that it would continue to charge customers for each core a reiteration of company policy, given in reaction to news at the time.
Microsoft Corp in October said it would charge customers just once for its software running on multi-core chips, instead of increasing customers’ costs by charging for each core. Microsoft joins Red Hat, Novell and Sun Microsystems.
Oracle vice president for global pricing and licensing strategy Jacqueline Woods said in September the vendor treats existing multi-core chips as a collection of single CPUs for licensing.We are not changing that model at this time, Woods said.
Software vendors are being challenged to examining licensing as AMD Inc and Intel Corp prepare to ramp the availability of multi core chips during the middle of 2005. While Sun and IBM have multi core chips, AMD and Intel promised to make multi-core a mass market.
Rozwat indicated Oracle’s position is changing, though, noting multi-core systems are a future problem and IBM and us are evaluating it.
We are trying to be fair to customers. We are trying to be fair across system partners. Multi-core systems will be somewhat different. We want to make sure it fits, Rozwat said.
