Oracle will not announce its pricing strategy for its 10g Database and Application Server products until they ship, but indicators suggest the firm will offer a menu of options. This could lead to confusion as the enterprise software giant attempts to make its upgraded products appealing to a variety of customer categories.

Oracle declined to give pricing details at the formal launch announcement of 10g earlier this month and caused confusion by giving two perspectives on the question. Chief executive Larry Ellison seemed to suggest that the grid-computing model used by 10g - where software can access spare processing cycles across networks - would favour subscription pricing, but Jacqueline Woods, Oracle vice president of global pricing and licensing, insisted the current per-CPU or per-named-user tariffs would continue.

Chuck Rozwat, Oracle executive vice president of server technologies, last week said that the company would keep its pricing secret until the launches of 10g Application Server in October and 10g Database, scheduled for late December.

"We haven't yet announced the pricing because we didn't want our technology message to be overshadowed by the pricing, as it has sometimes been in the past," Rozwat said. "We've had open discussions with our customers and we have the Oracle hosting option so you can buy it as a service."

Licensing complexity has long been a major issue for Oracle users, although the current pricing model is more popular than the previous one, which was based on processor megahertz.

Ronan Miles, chairman of the UK Oracle User Group, said he expected Oracle to move more customers to enterprise-wide licensing. "They're saying, 'We don't expect to sell you 10g piecemeal.' This works if you have a huge investment, in which case you already have an enterprise licence, or if you plan to be wall-to-wall Oracle. But I can't see Oracle making it mandatory to have an enterprise-wide licence and shutting out other parts of the market."

However, Miles said that smaller customers might feel neglected compared with companies that hold large Oracle licences. "At the 10g presentation I got the impression that if I was a small or medium-sized enterprise I would be feeling left out," he added.

In a separate initiative, IBM has been trying to push grid technology deeper into the computing-intensive financial sector. It has announced a series of projects to roll out grid systems to heavyweight financial clients and last week the firm boosted its commitment with offerings to handle credit risk within the financial services sector.

IBM said its Grid Offering for Analytics Acceleration enables credit scoring software from SAS to work faster and offer more insight into customers' credit histories.

Meanwhile, the IBM Grid Offering for Risk Management and Compliance: Capital Markets and Retail Banking is designed to help risk managers to implement a grid computing infrastructure to support real-time credit limit monitoring. Currently, many credit monitoring applications are run overnight.

The offering can also form the basis of a credit risk application infrastructure that complies with Basel 2, the forthcoming act designed to improve financial institutions' credit management procedures.