UPDATE: Oracle To Release New Price OptionUPDATE: Oracle To Release New Price Option

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told customers Tuesday that his company is trying to standardize installations of its business apps to help buyers rein in unpredictable costs. "The real cost is not what you pay us, sadly," he said. "It's the cost of running the software every day."

Writing more of its E-Business Suite 11i in Java; basing customer-service, human-resources, and financial apps on one database; and "routinizing" installations will let Oracle better predict customers' total cost of ownership and deliver more accurate views of data, Ellison said during a speech at Oracle's AppsWorld conference in San Diego. The company plans to give 11i customers a cost-of-ownership quote before they sign contracts and guarantee those prices. "We've been operating in the only industry in the world where we don't tell you what things cost until we're finished," Ellison said.

As part of that initiative, Oracle on Tuesday unveiled a pricing program for its business apps called All-in-One. The program aims to give midmarket customers price quotes that include the cost of buying, installing, and maintaining 11i apps. It's tied to a subscription-sales option Oracle plans to launch in March, in which customers will be able to buy some of Oracle's financial-management, inventory-management, and procurement software--hosted in an Oracle data center--for a setup price of about $15,000, plus $300 per month, says VP Jacqueline Woods, who helps manage Oracle's licensing programs. Support costs will add another 22% to those fees.

But it's unclear whether Oracle's pledge to predict cost of ownership includes software support, says Karen Garrison, an IT manager at The Dayton Power and Light Co., a utility in Ohio that uses Oracle applications. "We have people every day who answer questions for our employees, and that's a cost," she says.

Ellison said Oracle is trying to move more customers who buy 11i perpetual licenses to "suite" pricing, which offers volume discounts in comparison to paying for 11i modules separately. In addition, Oracle said that convenience-store chain 7-Eleven Inc. had bought 11i to manage vendor relations in 6,000 stores in the United States and Canada.