Oracle sheds light on Fusion migration and pricing

Oracle late yesterday filled in a few more details about its Fusion migration path and pricing policy.

Thomas Kurian, executive vice president of Oracle product development, told analysts during a webinar that existing customers would incur no extra costs by moving from one of Oracle’s many existing product families to the equivalent application in its new Fusion application suite.

He said that, while Oracle has yet to publicly disclose pricing for the 100-plus new modules that currently make up the suite, existing customers would get a “net-to-net credit” for moving over to the equivalent Fusion application.

“If you are an existing Applications Unlimited customer, with a current module and correctly paid up on support, you will get a net-to-credit for the corresponding Fusion module, so in fact our Fusion modules will be priced exactly the same for those customers,” said Kurian.

He added that additional costs would be incurred only when a customer wanted to add more seats or use “net new functionality”, which would be priced on a “net new basis”.

This would be the same for customers running standalone applications, but buying their database separately.

“We will give you credits for the database that you are moving over if you have an existing database contract,” he added.

The third area of additional Fusion pricing will cover a range of middleware functionality related to application servers, business process management and service-oriented architecture, and business intelligence and collaboration tools.

And a fourth encompasses all the pre-packaged functionality that Oracle has built of top of Fusion’s seven product families.

“In the example of Siebel sales and marketing, these could be packages around key performance indicators for the sales guys or the comparison of two different territories, for instance,” Kurian added.

In defending the lack of pricing detail, he also said Oracle was already quoting for existing customers, saying, “We’re not here to make them pay a higher price”.

There was also the suggestion that customers will be able to decouple Fusion licensing from the subscription and cloud-based service models the suite is being sold with.

“Some customers may want to buy a perpetual licence for the software, then buy the service separately on top,” Kurian said.

He argued this was good for both Oracle and its customers, as it would supply both licence and services revenue for the vendor, while offering a modular upgrade path that customers could follow at their own pace.

Interestingly, Kurian also said Oracle was already in talks with an Asia-Pacific customer over delivering Fusion modules in an appliance that exploits the fact that Fusion’s application architecture was engineered on Oracle hardware too.

“As soon as the suite is available we will offer customers the ability to deploy Fusion in an appliance-type configuration, where the data model and database sits on Exadata and the application middleware tiers can be run on Exalogic,” he added.