Oracle is quietly cutting down the cost of its flagship business intelligence (BI) foundation suite considerably. This is due to the fierce and increasing competition in this market segment.
Priced at a steep $450,000 previously for each processor license, the BI Foundation Suite has been revised to a new $300,000 price tag. The named user plus license, however, is still pegged at $3,675.
The BI Foundation Suite comprises of BI Publisher, Oracle BI Enterprise Edition, Strategy, Scorecard Management, and also the Essbase Analytics link, as per the official whitepaper.
The prices of the BI suite Enterprise Edition Plus, and Scorecard and Strategy Management have also been lowered. The former will cost $221,250 down from $295,000, and the latter’s price has been reduced from $149,250 to $89,550.
Earlier this year, Oracle had added support to pull data from the open source framework Hadoop, which is used for big data processing. An interacting connection with Excel was also added through a Microsoft Office connector.
While software vendors such as Oracle already give discounts on the cost prices, the new prices will further reduce the negotiable amount for customers.
The BI market has a huge competition, with both newcomers and traditional vendors coming up with their own products. Similar products are offered by many vendors, and so pricing becomes a cause of concern when buying such a product.
Miro Consulting, one of the firms that deal in customer contract negations with Oracle, recently came to know about the slash in BI prices, according to the company’s President, Mr. Eliot A. Colon such a high price slash with no prior announcements comes as quite odd from Oracle; he believes that there might be some catch here, such as an important management pack to increase the product’s usability. The company is still awaiting a reply from Oracle.
Oracle has recently completed the fourth fiscal quarter, the busiest period in its calendar for closing contracts. Miro, in the meantime, hasn’t seen too many new contracts from customer, though there have been queries about the product. BI software market had been strong despite the global recession, as organizations tried to seek efficiencies and insight from their business data.
According to a report from Gartner, the market of BI software grew at a slower rate of 7% compared to 17% in 2011. This market was standing at $13.1 billion for the year 2012, with SAP leading with $2.9 billion in revenue, closely followed by Oracle at $1.9 billion.
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