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Technology Stocks : Oracle Corporation (ORCL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J Bertrand who wrote (7791)	7/7/1998 3:24:00 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Respond to of 19080

Jeff, you know I have thought about your question myself. I don't know... you probably should direct this to a mktg person. Dell had what I would consider a modern architecture for Web-based applications, everything on NT boxes obviously. Everything was an ASP (processed on server vs. Java) because it was determined that Java couldnt handle the performance requirements. So there were lots and lots of servers needed to handle all the hits, and every one of these had a database installed. So say you order something, you might think your order goes into one database but thats not really true - your customer record goes into the customer database on server#1, your order on server#2, etc. So, a lot of data in a lot of places all requiring a database. My point is that Web-based applications seem to require the storage, movement and querying of a lot more database data than the prior model where you just called Dell on the phone and they entered things. So, its up to those pricing people to figure out a way to exploit this - certainly the old user licenses wont work. Michelle

To: J Bertrand who wrote (7791)	7/7/1998 4:22:00 PM
From: syborg	Respond to of 19080

Jeff, One of the advantages of an n-tier architecture is that the number of connections to a database is controllable based upon the application server(s) sitting between the client and the data. You may be using the pipe more than in the traditional client/server model, but the maximum number of connections is a known entity. syborg

To: J Bertrand who wrote (7791)	7/7/1998 4:50:00 PM
From: Bob Sutton	Respond to of 19080

Jeff, I'm not sure that this will answer your question but offer it as a slightly different perspective. During the time I worked at Oracle in the 1980's, our software licenses evolved from a "tiered" pricing model tied to the relative horsepower of a customer's designated CPU, to various "count-the-users" models, in which customers paid some licensing increment for each additional discrete or concurrent user. As you might expect, this transition marked the changeover from host-and-terminal to client/server architectures. More recently, the industry standard has been to license Servers rather than Users, since the client-side functionality is disappearing behind "thin" browser connections. Back in 1988, Larry Ellison told me that he believed the ideal software licensing model for a database vendor of the future would be one that captured a "millage rate" for each row accessed from a database table during a business process. It might represent some minor fraction of a cent per row, but would provide a continuous revenue stream immune to the usual quarterly and business-cycle hiccups. I recall that he referred to the notion as "data utility pricing". He was convinced that -- given adequate metering technology -- this pricing scheme would most directly compensate vendors according to their product's "usefulness". As a software salesman accustomed to those big one-time license transactions, I was, quite naturally, aghast at this suggestion. But as an investor, it doesn't seem so far-fetched. Bob Sutton