As Oracle preaches to its customers and partners at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco this week, IBM is doing some counter-programming. Today, IBM launched a program to help Oracle's hardware and software customers dig a tunnel to freedom—or at least lower their license costs—with a set of offers that includes free consulting and zero percent financing.

Since Oracle's acquisition of Sun and BEA, the company has made a number of changes to licensing schemes for its database and middleware products. In 2008 and 2009, the company raised prices on many of its database and middleware product licenses, in some cases by as much as 40 percent—though Oracle has often heavily discounted licenses for some customers, so the actual cost can vary widely. And late last year, Oracle jacked up the entry point for MySQL support from $500 to $2,000 for one server up to four processor sockets.

On the hardware front, Oracle has also moved to increase both the price tag of its Exadata appliances and the cost of support—though Oracle has also added significant processing power to the systems as well.

The cost of Oracle-certified training has also gone up—as of this month, Oracle has upped the cost of Java and Solaris certifications by adding required instructor-led training courses, after extending the deadline several times for those already in training to complete certification.

Taking a page from the auto industry, IBM's "Stop, Think, and Save" program is an open bid to draw Oracle customers over to the blue side with the promise of up to 50 percent savings on IT costs (over a three- to five-year period), an offer of free migration planning and reduced-rate consulting services, plus zero-percent financing or six-month payment deferment to get you into a brand new Power system as soon as possible with no money down. They'll even cart away your old Sparc or HP hardware.

It would take some pretty significant discounts to cushion the retooling blow, however. While IBM has free migration tools, there are some significant architectural and feature differences between Oracle 11 and DB2 that will require some recoding of applications and stored procedures. While IBM SQL PL and Oracle PL/SQL are close—IBM claims customers have found that 95 percent to 99 percent of their PL/SQL code is compatible with DB2—checking and fixing the code that isn't will give DBAs, developers, and IBM professional services teams plenty to do.