Hi All,
A non technical, licensing type question/request/topic. Our company is definitely in the SME business with maybe 700 or so employees.
In my company we have two main development teams:
1) Sales / contract type application supporting 350 daily users. Its been written using .Net C# and Dev Express framework. SQL*Server and IIS based.
2) APEX 5.1, SE 12.1 Finance application with 200-250 daily users. (average 70,000 page hits per weekday, a bit more during month end).
There is a 3rd legacy application (terminal based) also with 50 users which is an older version of the Sales / Contract app that needs migrating.
The company wants to migrate & merge all applications. (and they do share quite a lot of data)
They really like APEX. The user experience is good, and they love how productive it is to develop in.
They really don't like Dev Express. Although the development experience is good. it doesn't perform well and doesn't scale. They want/need to move away from it to merge / migrate the legacy application.
Given a choice, they would like to use APEX for future development. However the feeling is that combining the current APEX application with a new sales / contract, and migrating the legacy system is going to push them over the limit of Standard Edition, and they are then in DB EE territory. This is seen as prohibitively expensive. So, they are looking at possibly a native C# .Net based solution based possibly on a PostgreSQL database.
Its a shame, as it would be great for the company to select APEX, but without the fear of having to purchase EE licenses.
I know there are lots of other considerations. (cost of development vs speed of APEX dev framework etc, skill sets. hidden costs.
I also notice,if you look at the marketplace. APEX is still extremely niche, whereas .Net C# is very widely used.
Anyhow, apart from general comments, my point is: Could Oracle consider / come up with a restricted licensing model for APEX that fills the gap between SE and EE, or makes it easier for APEX to scale from a cost/licensing perspective. It would allow companies like mine to make a decision to use APEX without the fear of hitting a performance limitation wall, and having spend huge chunks of $$$ to get over it...
On a related side note: anyone explored a hybrid solution. i.e. APEX/SE as the development mid tier platform, but a separate database for data (either Oracle or 3rd party database). then linked via DB links? Would this help scale/be viable?
Rgds
Richard