Oracle will give away an application server bundle to
software makers that choose to embed it with their applications to
increase its share of the application server market.
It will also sell the new Oracle 9i Application Server Java
Edition for $5,000 per processor, much less than the $10,000 and
$20,000 per processor it charges for the standard and enterprise
edition application server bundles, respectively.
"This offer is designed to seed the market with our fully
complete Java application server," said Tim Payne, Oracle marketing
director.
The new bundle includes Oracle's J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise
Edition) application server with clustering support, five licences
for Oracle's 9i JDeveloper development tools, Oracle HTTP
(Hypertext Transfer Protocol) Server, Oracle 9iAS TopLink and the
Oracle Enterprise Manager system management tool, Oracle said.
"It has everything a company will need to develop and deploy
enterprise-scale Java-based Web services as opposed to the crippled
versions that you can get from other companies," Payne said,
referring to the entry-level application servers offered by market
leaders BEA Systems and IBM.
Missing from the new Oracle application server bundle, when
compared with the Oracle 9i Application Server Standard Edition,
are the Oracle9iAS Portal application and the Oracle Content
Management SDK (software developer's kit).
Oracle will not charge customers of ISVs that embed the
software, Payne said. Embedding means that the Oracle application
server is installed automatically with an ISV's application
BEA and IBM led the 2001 worldwide application server market in
revenue, followed at a distance by Oracle and Sun Microsystems.
Analyst companies have yet to release 2002 numbers. However, even
with its new marketing tack, Oracle will not beat BEA or IBM, said
IDC research director Rob Hailstone.
"My expectation is that IBM and BEA will continue to have a very
large lead over everybody else and Oracle will want to close that
gap. What Oracle is doing is probably going to hurt Sun."