benchmarkingblog

I guess when you are really really rich you can do things like miss your own keynote to go to a sporting event. Or get prices wrong by millions of dollars.

Yes, I took Econ 1A in college (though I may remember more about the cute boy in the row in front of me than supply and demand). I clearly remember grasping the intricate graphs and complex formulas in the thick colorful book by Samuelson.

But that preparation did not seem to help this week in trying to understand the new Oracle “Economics” at OpenWorld. A quick search did not lead to any scholarly articles on “near linear pricing.” If there is any sort of “re-engineering” of economics going on, it has not been picked up by the MBA programs just yet.

So when you see any pricing comparisons from Oracle these days, here is what you need to know:

• Sometimes the systems compared have different numbers of processor cores. Sometimes the systems are the same “size” but size does not equal the performance of what can be run on the system.
• Sometimes the systems compared have different amounts of memory. Sometimes the systems have the same amount of memory but amount of memory does not equal the performance of what can be run on the system.
• Sometimes Oracle includes no software on their system and includes software on the other vendor’s system.
• Sometimes Oracle does not include the expensive Oracle database license costs, which by the way are calculated by core.
• Sometimes the systems compared have very very different types of support and maintenance.
• Sometimes the systems compared have very different types and amounts of storage included. Or no storage at all. As we know, storage can be a large part of a system’s configuration and price.

There has been absolutely NO substantiation to justify equivalent price configurations for equivalent throughput systems in these comparisons.

What is ultimately important is what non-functional requirements the system gives you at a certain price. Compare, and do the TCO. And tell Oracle: I don’t buy sockets, I buy performance.

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