Today, IBM is launching a new IBM DB2 vs. Oracle Database advertising campaign. This camapign will run in both print and online media. Much of the content in the current and upcoming ads will be familiar to readers of this blog. I hope you enjoy them…
Love it! Glad to see the ads are getting out there.
I remember IBM once saying:
No we won’t ever ever advertise individual products !
Now things seem to change.
When will we see the same for Informix ?
but this is advertising *two* products, db2 on powerpc versus oracle on sparc.
Hi Eric,
It is true that IBM rarely does product-level advertising. In fact, the DB2 team have been asking in vain for awareness-generating product-level advertising for a long, long time. I think its fair to say that the increasingly competitive nature of the IBM-Oracle relationship (thanks to developments like Oracle raising the price of its software on IBM Power Systems in an attempt to halt Sun server market share declines) has led to a situation where IBM corporate sees a need for product-level competitive advertising. I’m sure that IBM could easily have chosen any of a number of software products for these campaigns, including Informix. I do know that a number of angles were were explored, and that there were quite a few disappointed product teams within IBM when the “top ads” were chosen.
Regards,
Conor.
Hmm – I think IBM raised the price of their software on Power Systems (PVU =120) long before Oracle did. They also did the same on Intel (PVU=120). Oracle followed suit with IBM on P Series, and left the price the same on Intel
Hi Mark,
If this is the Mark Townsend at Oracle, I feel honored to have you comment on my blog.
You can see the IBM table here… Processor Value Unit [PVU] licensing. IBM does charge different amounts for different processor types and configurations. POWER7 configurations vary from 70 PVUs to 120 PVUs; POWER6 from 80 to 120 PVUs; and Intel from 50 to 100 PVUs.
The Oracle table is here… Oracle Processor Core Factor Table. Oracle has a core factor of 1.0 for POWER7, 1.0 for POWER 6, and between 0.5 and 1.0 for Intel.
The development I was referring to was when Oracle quietly raised the price of its software on POWER6 servers. See coverage of this story from The Register.
Dude, please.
I wouldnt call that an ad.
Anyhoo, numbers dont lie, http://www.monster.com
db2 jobs =35
Oracle = 270…
Yeah, I see the way
Hi Joe,
I just tried a search on Monster now and got >1000 jobs for both. Perhaps those search results were for your local area? Here are the URLs I used:
Oracle Database – http://jobsearch.monster.com/PowerSearch.aspx?q=Oracle%20Database&rad=20&rad_units=miles&tm=60
DB2 – http://jobsearch.monster.com/PowerSearch.aspx?q=db2&rad=20&rad_units=miles&tm=60
Speaking of numbers that don’t lie
I do have an interesting number to share… and this has been cleared by IBM legal to use publicly… in 2010, more than 1,000 Oracle Database customers chose IBM DB2 instead.
Searching for DB2 will include all mainframe jobs. Try searching for DB2 LUW or DB2 UDB – significantly less numbers
There is no question that Oracle Database has greater market share–and therefore more users–than IBM DB2. I am happy to acknowledge that. But I’m also very happy with the momentum of IBM DB2, especially when it comes to recent Oracle Database displacements. Organizations don’t make such decisions lightly, so this in itself says a lot…
You stated
“More than 1,000 Oracle Database customers chose IBM DB2 instead.”
Couple of interesting observations about that number.
Firstly, my marketing and legal wonks always advise me to never use absolute numbers, as they don’t show momentum, and are very easy to gainsay. Percentage increase or decrease is much more interesting to customers.
So what does 1000 customers potentially mean to Oracle ? We claim 300,000 database customers globally – so 1000 customers churning to IBM represents around 0.3% of the install base. Not so an impressive a number – but still some reason for concern.
But what is not covered is how many IBM DB2 customers are replacing their DB2 databases (or apps that use DB2 databases) with Oracle solutions. I can put a $1000 a month into my cheque account – but if I take out %1500 a month, things are NOT going well.
Then I also note “chose IBM DB2 instead” – not “ditched Oracle and moved to IBM DB2″ – so does this mean that somewhere in the Oracle universe these customers are now also running IBM DB2 as well ? If so, that’s a very uninteresting number – DB2 is widely embedded in many IBM software products – does a customer running IBM Tivoli in their Data Center count as one of the 1000 ?
The “more than 1,000″ number does not include databases embedded in IBM products. It also does not include community editions. It is for large enterprise sales. As I said, we are happy with the momentum
FYI, I just saw some interesting data from indeed.com… on average, a DB2 DBA gets paid more than an Oracle DBA ($97k for DB2 vs. $93k for Oracle).
What – no ability to reply to your post ? If you look at the PVU table posted, both Power 7, Power 6 and high end Intel ended up with a factor of 120. This is from previous factors of 100 and 50 respectively. So IBM definitely raised their prices on their hardware and Linux/Windows, long before Windows. Of course, IBM raising prices is not news, so there is no news story
Hi Mark,
> What – no ability to reply to your post ?
This blog doesn’t support nesting comments more than 4 deep for readability reasons.
> If you look at the PVU table posted, both Power 7, Power 6
> and high end Intel ended up with a factor of 120.
> This is from previous factors of 100 and 50 respectively.
Its interesting to see how you present this. IBM sets its prices based on the processing power of the server. In effect, IBM says that less powerful POWER7 servers have a PVU of 70 and more powerful POWER7 servers have a PVU of 120. It is NOT a case of IBM increasing the price of its software for all POWER7 servers from 70 PVUs to 120 PVUs. Instead, IBM is saying that if someone wants to run IBM software on one of the less powerful POWER7 servers, they need pay only for 70 PVUs. They don’t have to pay the same as someone running it on a more powerful server.
Of course, here we are talking about a multiplier for the software. We shouldn’t lose track of the base software price. For Oracle Database, it is $47,500 in the US (which does NOT include the first year’s support and maintenance). For IBM DB2, it is $40,500 in the US (which DOES include the first year’s support and maintenance). Also, check out… IBM DB2 Strikes Another Blow to Oracle Database.
> Of course, IBM raising prices is not news, so there is no news story
Here are the facts:
– In June 2008, Oracle raised the prices of its software products by between 15% and 20%.
– In March 2009, Oracle changed their multiplier for systems using the POWER6 CPU, in effect raising the price of Oracle Database on POWER6 by 33%.
– In July 2009, Oracle raised the price of their Management and Tuning packs for Oracle Database Enterprise Manager by more than 40%.
– In this time, IBM did NOT raise the price of its DB2 software.
For more details about the Oracle price hikes, see More Oracle Price Hikes and Oracle Price Increases Examined for Sample Configuration.
So, you can see that the facts actually show that it is Oracle who have been raising their software prices, not IBM
So if the P7 and Intel core both have a PVU of 120, does that mean that IBM then equates them as having equivalent “power” ?
If a DB2 customer is on a P6 now (70 PVUs), and upgrades hardware to the new P7 (120 PVUs), doesn’t that represent a 70% increase in the price of their IBM software on that new hardware ?
Similarly if a customer is on DB2 on Linux with Intel, and upgrades their hardware to a newer Intel box, doesn’t their PVU rating go from 50 to 120, representing a 240% increase in the price of their IBM software on a Linux platform ?
Note that Oracle has a multiplier of .50 on Intel and 1 on P7, so based on your prices above ($47K and $40.5K respectively), IBM is now twice the price on an Intel core than Oracle, and more or less the same on a P7 core.
And the $40.5K only includes the FIRST year of support and maintenance, allowing IBM to effectively gouge customers year 2+.
I’ve a lot of misinformation to correct here
Here’s how the “gouging” works out…
Oracle Database, Year 1: $57,950 (= $47,500 + 22%)
Oracle Database, Year 2: $10,450 (= 22%)
Oracle Database, Year 3: $10,450 (= 22%)
etc.
IBM DB2, Year 1: $40,500
IBM DB2, Year 2: $8,100 (= 20%)
IBM DB2, Year 3: $8,100 (= 20%)
etc.
Okay, you asked about P7 and Intel both having 120 PVUs. First, I’d like to correct this. It’s not 120 PVUs for P7 and Intel. The number of PVUs depends on the model (and number of CPU sockets). For servers with 2 CPU sockets, IBM charges 70 PVUs per core; for servers with 4 CPU sockets, IBM charges 100 PVUs per core; and for servers with more than 4 CPU sockets, IBM charges 120 PVUs per core. In other words, a POWER 7-based server is 70 PVUs, 100 PVUs, or 120 PVUs depending on the server in question.
As regards upgrading your hardware… if you move from POWER6 to POWER7, the price difference depends on your old and new systems. Depending on the model of the POWER6 server, you will have 80 PVUs or 120 PVUs. Depending on the model of the POWER7 server, you will have 70 PVUs, 100 PVUs, or 120 PVUs. It could be that you have the same PVUs (e.g. move from 120 -> 120), it could be that you have an increase (e.g. move from 80 -> 100), or it could be that you actually decrease your PVUs (e.g. move from 80 -> 70). Again, it depends on the relative systems involved.
Similarly, for Intel it is the same story. The relative PVU difference depends on the systems involved. It could be that you are moving from a Nehalem EP to a 2-socket Nehalem EX, in which case it is the same number of PVUs. The key thing to understand is that there is a granularity to the pricing, depending on the specific systems involved.
And don’t forget that IBM is much more flexible when it comes to sub-capacity licensing for its software. In other words, IBM offers a lot more flexibility for licensing individual software products on a subset of the processor cores in a server. In fact, I think this would make for a very interesting blog post. I’ll get to this soon.
By the way, your analysis of relative pricing on Intel is fair. Oracle has a multiplier of 0.5 (for everything but Itanium 93xx). The IBM multiplier varies from 50 PVUs to 120 PVUs. So the list price IBM software will be more expensive for higher-end Intel-based configurations ($28,975 for Oracle, compared with between $28,350 and $48,600 for DB2). However, on POWER systems, the list price for Oracle Database will always be higher than DB2. For the higher-end POWER7 systems, Oracle = $57,950, while IBM is $48,600 (based on purchase of one processor core at 1.0 for Oracle and 120 PVUs for IBM plus support and maintenance for year 1). For the lower-end POWER7 systems, Oracle = $57,950, while IBM is $28,350 (for 70 PVUs).
I’m going to follow up with IBM Pricing regarding the rationale for the relative PVU values (POWER vs. Intel). These PVU values apply to all IBM software (and not just DB2), and my team has not been involved in setting them. What the DB2 team can control is the base price. So, again, I will update this blog post with a comment to explain the rationale for the relative PVU values soon.
This is interesting – http://tinyurl.com/4r4dg75 – shows that Google users execute search terms for information about the Oracle database, MySQL, and even SQL Server approximately 30, 20 or 14 times more then they do for DB2.
This does not take away from the fact that:
- Organizations are reporting that it is now relatively easy to move from Oracle Database to IBM DB2. See Forrester’s coverage in Database Migrations Are Finally Becoming Simpler and Simpler Database Migrations Have Arrived!
- Organizations like Reliance Life are reporting that their total cost for moving to DB2 is half the cost of staying with Oracle Database. And that 50% number is not a cost comparison of a straight-up decision between buying Oracle Database or IBM DB2. Its a cost comparison between an already purchased Oracle Database to a new purchase of IBM DB2.
And, of course, that after moving to IBM DB2, database administrators and programmers can continue to leverage their Oracle skills. For instance, I know customers who have migrated from Oracle Database to IBM DB2, and continue to program in PL/SQL after the migration (DB2 supports PL/SQL).
Interestingly enough…if you add the word “error” to that search you provided, the oracle to db2 ratio doesn’t really change. So, your argument – while accurate – may not be what you intended.
That’s probably because the search engine in My Oracle Support is poor, as an Oracle DBA I find Google very useful for finding solutions to Oracle bugs.