EnterpriseDB goes after Oracle's European users

Oracle's European customers fed up with handing over huge wads of cash to purchase and support their databases will get some relief starting from next week.

EnterpriseDB, the open source database company nipping at Oracle's heals in the US, is today expected to open its first European sales offices in the UK. The opening follows this month's Asia Pacific expansion in Hong Kong.

Andy Astor, EnterpriseDB's chief executive, told The Register Oracle is his prime target in Europe. "Seventy five to eighty per cent of the applications we come across run on EnterpriseDB without any change. Oracle is our primary direction," Astor said.

He ruled out a potential run in with open source rival Ingres, the CA spinout that has a healthy European footprint. "It's not about Ingres, it's about Oracle," Astor said.

EnterpriseDB claimed 100 customers during 2006 with growing traction among the Oracle base. Earlier this month Enterprise announced new support for its PostgreSQL database starting at $1,500 per CPU and topping out at $3,000. That compares to Oracle Standard One with a per processor license starting at $4,995 and $1,098 support, and that runs to $40,000 per processor and $8,800 for Enterprise Edition.

Obviously, these are list prices and the devil very much lies in the detail in terms of discounts that customers can extract or that Oracle is willing to dispense.

EnterpriseDB is playing hardball for Oracle customers on price combined with the carrot of application compatibility for those running their businesses on packaged ERP and CRM applications. The company also hopes to exploit discontent among those being audited by Oracle for their software.®