Oracle unveiled a major update to its applications portfolio last week, launching five upgraded suites and outlining plans to simplify its much-criticised licensing model.

Speaking at a launch event in New York, Oracle president Charles Phillips announced major application upgrades covering suites from Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel and JD Edwards. He also said that the company would “simplify” licensing to deliver “consistency across all solutions”.

Jesper Andersen, senior vice-president of application strategy at Oracle, said the new licensing model would cover all the vendor’s different applications and deliver more transparency and choice to customers.

“The [licensing] models [for the different apps] weren’t the same, so with PeopleSoft you may buy based on the size of the company and with E-Business Suite you may buy based on number of users,” he explained. “Now you can buy software using one model.”

The news was welcomed by customers, many of whom have criticised Oracle’s licensing strategy. “My experience of the price matrices around E-Business Suite has been a nightmare,” said Chris Jones, business projects manager at Napp Pharmaceuticals. “So anything that makes [licensing] simpler is a good thing.”

John Rodway, European head of the Oracle practice at IT services firm Fujitsu Services, predicted many customers would support a unified licensing scheme. “We do have customers that use PeopleSoft and Oracle and they have been saying, ‘Why is licensing like that here and not here?’” he said.

Also at the event, Oracle unveiled a raft of enhancements to its application portfolio. These included version 12 of its E-Business suite, designed to make it easier to manage processes across different geographies; a new edition of PeopleSoft Enterprise featuring improved talent management capabilities; and an update to Siebel CRM that delivers a new task-based interface.

Oracle denied that the upgrades betrayed a lack of focus on its planned Fusion suite, which promises to unify its various applications in a single product. Andersen insisted that Oracle is continuing to invest in all its application lines and is already working on the next releases of its PeopleSoft and Siebel suites, but at the same time remains “100 percent committed” to Fusion.

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