Light version of 9iAS just for Forms/Reports Deployment at a reduced cost
Is there any possibility that Oracle will introduce a light version of 9iAS solely for Forms/Reports deployment at a reduced licensing cost?
I am not able to convince my people to use 9iAS enterprise edition just to deploy forms and reports. We have open source tools and are not interested in 9iAS except the forms and reports services part of it. The 20,000$ per CPU is way too expensive for us just to deploy a forms/reports application that consists of 100 forms and 20 reports.
This application is running in client/server environment (for which the runtime environment is free) on Solaris and Linux. There are multiple end users (not individuals but institutions/organizations) of this application around the world which can only run it on their LANs/intranets but not over the internet (for security reasons). Therefore it is not only an issue of deploying the application at the location where it is developed, but convincing the end users of the application to deploy it on their intranets via a light version of 9iAS at a relatively cheap licensing cost. Note that these end users are already licensed for the Oracle database server as a requirement for this application.
Unless you come up with a light version at a comparable price (to JRUN, Orion server, etc), we can not deploy Oracle web forms/reports.
Any input of Oracle Forms/Reports development group members and other users (for their view on licensing) is appreciated.