Major Price Cuts in Essbase, OBIEE, BIFS, and OSSM

Pricing Went Down 25-40%

While Oracle is pretty good at giving discounts off list price, it's rare when they actually cut their list prices.  Shockingly, they just lowered (for what I believe is the first time since these products made it onto the price lists) the per processor prices on several of their Business Intelligence offerings: Essbase, OBIEE (Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation Suite), BIFS (Business Intelligence Foundation Suite), and OSSM (Oracle Scorecard & Strategy Management).

Per the price list dated June 25, 2013, the per processor prices have dropped substantially:

• Essbase went from $184,000 to $138,000.  That's a 25% decrease.
• OBIEE went from $295,000 to $221,250.  That's also a 25% decrease.
• BIFS went from $450,000 to $300,000.  That's a 33% decrease.
• OSSM went from $149,250 to $89,550.  That's a 40% decrease.

Now think about this for a second.  BIFS (Business Intelligence Foundation Suite) comes with Essbase, OBIEE, OSSM, and a few other fun things like EAL4HFM (Essbase Analytics Link for HFM).  BIFS was already a great deal because just buying Essbase, OBIEE, and OSSM separately was setting you back $628,250 but as a bundle costs you only $450,000.  That's a 28% decrease off just those 3 components separately.  Now those separate components list at $448,800 or if you buy the BIFS bundle, $300,000 which is a 33% discount off the components separately.

In other words, you now get OBIEE, Essbase, OSSM, and some other products for just $5,000 more per processor than OBIEE cost alone 2 weeks ago (it was $295,000, remember).  The named user costs for these products has not changed which means that they are positioning these price cuts directly at the enterprise customers: companies who are looking to adopt Oracle Business Analytics across their organization.  Considering those prices above are list, enterprise customers should be getting a discount starting off those prices which makes processor licensing start to seem very attractive for large deployments.

Core Factors

Also remember that Oracle doesn't charge this full price for every core on the processor.  They have a "processor factor" which charges less per core.  Depending on the type of processor, the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table will charge between 25% and 100% of the list processor price.

Take Exalytics X2-4, for example.  It has 4 Intel Xeon E7-4800 chips in it.  Each of those chips has 10 cores giving you 40 cores in total.  Based on the Processor Factor, these cores count as only half a processor.  In other words, to license a full X2-4, you'd need to pay for 20 processor licenses which at the new $300,000 price means a list of $6,000,000.  That's the maximum (not including tax, maintenance, TimesTen, etc.) that you'd pay but it would assumedly come in less than that which is really impressive to license an entire Exalytics box for unlimited users.  Unlimited, people.  Your whole organization could access OBIEE and Essbase for at most $6MM in software.

This may be the pricing discount your company needs to buy unlimited user licenses of Oracle Business Analytics.  And don't hold your breath for Oracle to drop any more list prices.  Take it as a gift and buy it before they change their minds.

Update as of 7-15-13

According to an article on Information Week, during the release of Exalytics X3-4, Paul Rodwick was asked about the recent price decreases mentioned above.  He gave the intriguing response that while the prices did go down, it's "old news" because Oracle stealthily did it 9 months ago.  While I don't have the technology price list he's referring to (if you do, post a link to it in the comments), here's Paul's quote:

The cost for BI Foundation Suite on a named-user basis has never been changed, but about nine months ago we adjusted per-CPU pricing in part because we were seeing more customers want to license the full complement of Exalytics.