BEA's case, the company charges a 25 premium for dual-core servers.
In the face of policy statements from several competitors, Oracle executives indicated over the past several months that they were re-evaluating their licensing model to take into account multicore chips.
In Oracle's new licensing plan, customers need to take the number of cores used in a server processor and multiply that by 0.75 and then round up to a whole number. For example, a multicore chip with 11 cores will be counted as 9 processors. (11 times 0.75 equals 8.25, which is rounded up to 9.)
Noel Yuhanna, a database analyst at Forrester Research, expects Oracle to revisit its pricing plan again in the near future.
"This could hurt their revenue if they take a stance of charging a premium for dual and multicore," Yuhanna said. "The (database) technologies from IBM, Microsoft and Oracle are very comparable, so it comes down to cost. Cost is an important factor."
Giera said that another point muddying the license picture is virtualization, where several operating systems can run on a single processor.
Virtualization software company VMware, a subsidiary of EMC, this month intends to announce that dual-core processors will be treated as a single chip when calculating license cost for its entire line.
But even as vendors state their new policies, Giera said that corporate customers need to look carefully at the details of different vendors' terms.
"Everyone's got a slightly different twist on how you have to pay for virtualization and multicore," she said. "You need to understand the implications before you do any financial modeling."
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