5 ways to reduce advertising network latency

Oracle has halved the cost of its Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software (EECS), an offering it says is “the unique set of software components, tools, and documentation required to make the Exalogic Elastic Cloud Hardware functional and usable as a platform for Oracle's Fusion Middleware and business applications.”

Announced in a blog post, the price cut means “EECS price has been reduced from $US20k/processor to $US10k/processor.”

Oracle's Australian spokesblokes told The Register the company is “unable to make comment about pricing changes”.

Let's therefore try to fill that vacuum.

Oracle's results, released today offered horrible news about the state of its hardware division, even if the engineered systems group did very well. But Oracle faces stiff competition in that space. The likes of EMC's Greenplum group offer one alternative, and EMC-spawn VCE also offers stack-in-a-box products it has just refreshed.

Then there are the likes of Scale Computing that recently boosted its integrated cloudy offerings. All of those would still need an OS and sometimes a middleware layer to get apps up and running, so perhaps Oracle is undercutting them.

Hardly anyone drops the price of a product in order to sell less of it, so perhaps Oracle wants to push more Exadatas out the door in an effort to staunch the flow of red ink from its overall hardware operations. Might dropping the price therefore be a way to cut the overall cost of an Oracle cloud, the better to fend off competitors. Or were customers keen on the kit, but balking at the licensing cost for what is essentially an operating system at a time such software can often be had for the low, low, price of nothing?

Perhaps Big Red will reveal its reasoning for the cut at OpenWorld next week. The Register's San Francisco hacks will be all over the event, so don't touch that dial! ®

5 ways to reduce advertising network latency