By R "Ray" Wang

Oracle President Charles Phillips pleasantly surprised Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) Collaborate 09 attendees this morning during his keynote with the decision to waive Extended Support fees for a number of product lines through 2010 and 2011. As customers and prospects face one of the worst global economic crises, proactive relief on support and maintenance fees could not come at a better time.

Oracle President Charles Phillips pleasantly surprised Oracle
Applications User Group (OAUG) Collaborate 09 attendees this morning
during his keynote with the decision to waive Extended Support fees for
a number of product lines through 2010 and 2011. As customers and
prospects face one of the worst global economic crises, proactive
relief on support and maintenance fees could not come at a better
time.  Summary details of the program can be found in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Oracle's Revised Support Policies

Since SAP's announcement of its single tier Enterprise Support plan last July,
customers have continued to express dissatisfaction.   In response to
such complaints, the SAP User Group Executive Network (SUGEN) of 12 SAP
user groups and SAP have been engaging in discussions around the value
derived from this new offering.  This morning SAP and SUGEN announced
an agreement on three key areas of the Enterprise Support offering:

By R "Ray" Wang

Oracle announces a $7.4B deal for SUN just a few weeks after the IBM deal fell through.  Oracle now controls a significant major open source alternative and a nice piece of the high end computing business.  These open source components have been viewed as the alternative to the dominance of the Big 4 or MISO (Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle).   Oracle also gains an innovation engine with the assets of Sun's Labs groups which pioneers a series of innovations that include potential enterprise solutions for the virtual world.  The deal puts Oracle on a continued path to acquiring deeper components of the enterprise computing stack.  Here's how the stack looks:

• Middleware - While Java and Solaris may appear to be the crown jewels in the deal, Oracle has managed to slowly buy out other stack competitors (i.e.
  

Oracle announces a $7.4B deal for SUN just a few weeks after the IBM
deal fell through.  Oracle now controls a significant major open source
alternative and a nice piece of the high end computing business.  These
open source components have been viewed as the alternative to the
dominance of the Big 4 or MISO (Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle).  
Oracle also gains an innovation engine with the assets of Sun's Labs
groups which pioneers a series of innovations that include potential
enterprise solutions for the virtual world.  The deal puts Oracle on a
continued path to acquiring deeper components of the enterprise
computing stack.  Here's how the stack looks: