If people are prepared to pay $25,000 per employee (wtf, I know some idiots^Wpeople worship the Oracle, but that's rediculous), how on earth are you going to convince them that your $120 per month offering is competing in the same market?

Pirate flag for Oracle, bunch of sodding pirates.

Sun's carrot and stick strategy with Oracle is a joke.

Life is great after being RIF'd

Saw this interesting site recently: http://www.sunsucks.com

It depends how much your developers really used the J2EE stack.

If you went heavily for EJBs and MDBs over several servers then I would stick with the proven Weblogic solution.

On the other hand if your developers (sensibly) ignored all the J2EE stuff and implemented mostly servlets and POJOs glassfish is a good choice.

Not sure about the price though, what do they mean by employee?

My current client could end up paying $800,000 to license a mostly open sourced product.

POWER to the people. SPARC fans of years gone by are moving in mass to IBM's POWER technology. For Oracle products you get about a 6-1 per core advantage vs. SPARCIV+ which is end of life. The Power advantage vs. SPARC64 is 3.7 to 1. The software savings alone makes the hardware purchase free.

Sun's #1 problem is Oracle as 90% of their sales have a piece of Oracle. They continue to make an enemy of their most important sw partner.

I think you'll find that the pricing is $25,000 PER PROCESSOR, not per user. Each processor can support hundreds, if not thousands, of users.

There are also fractional multipliers for various multi-core processors (i.e. each core in a dual core Intel processor is charged at 50%).

You may want to actually read and comprehend before flaming a company for trying to rip off customers. For $25,000 per employee, I'd also expect them to show up and buy me coffee, do my laundry, etc. but no-one is actually charging that.

Anonymous, because I work for one of the companies mentioned in the piece.

Sun's 120$ (I guess it is per year) per employee means all company full time staff (academic is different - 1 student = 1/4 full time) and includes some level of support (as far as I recall). It is worth to point out that solaris licenses + virtualisation are free of charge . OS & HW support is covered by same support package (optional but highly recommended)

IBM charges for everything: HW + HW Support + AIX(per CPU or Core) + virtualisation + AIX support (per CPU or Core).

Maybe someone will argue at initial purchase stages, but at the end of the year they realize IBM pricing exactly as I wrote above.

At the price/performance front I would say IBM system price looks higher in

most cases than Sun's comparable performance HW (in my region). Oracle is pricing Power+, UltraSparc VI+, Niagara2 cores with same fractional multipliers and if you put energy costs into equation for the same performance/core, most likely Sun's system will win.

In general, performance tuning depends on apps and admins, but for the time being Solaris tunning tools are more sophisticated, in my opinion.

So, with recent all Oracle SW price increase (~15-17%) I hardly believe in:

"For Oracle products you get about a 6-1 per core advantage vs. SPARCIV+ which is end of life. The Power advantage vs. SPARC64 is 3.7 to 1. The software savings alone makes the hardware purchase free." by Anonymous Coward, that looks like outdated a bit.

Do they even support JEE yet? I know that they still weren't fully supporting Java 5 (SE, not even JEE) a few months after Java 6 came out. I don't think that BEA users would be willing to step back in time five years to move to Websphere...