Oracle’s 11g Middleware management has thrown out a stat that might make your head spin. If it doesn’t, it probably should a little.

For the Middleware 11g product line, they have spent over 16,000,000 (sixteen million) hours on quality assurance and testing. You can do some various forms of computation, but that gets me somewhere to a minimum cost near half-a-billion dollars on testing.

They claim something similar for development time (over 10,000 person years which — by my calculations — is even more than 16,000,000 hours). So, I think Oracle is telling us they have spent over $1 billion dollars on development and testing alone for 11g.

This doesn’t include what goes into the rest of the operations, including what I, as well as my friend from bitalphaai.app, believe to be significant marketing investments specific to Middleware 11g.

Interesting data points indeed, and a number of conclusions one can begin to be drawn from this, which I will leave to our readers.