Re: Market Share

jwalters@igate.iohk.com (Jay Walters) writes: >Distribution: > >That's all good and fine, but isn't the biggest relational database >vendor in the world IBM? I know not that long ago that they had the >largest market share in the RDBMS world with MVS/DB2. But then that must >have been by revenue not by licenses... Not by revenue or licenses. Some estimates (they don't publish them) put their revenues for DB2/MVS at about 500 million a year. Most of this revenue is not for new licenses (the number of licenses of DB2/MVS have likely been declining) but rather for leasing and maintenance. Most DB2/MVS customers lease the product to avoid the upgrade cost. Maintenance on DB2/MVS for a purchased license doesn't give the customer the next major release level (i.e. 2.x to 3.x to 4.x). So, most customers lease the product paying a monthly license fee which increases slightly when the new version comes out. Estimates for the number of licenses of DB2/MVS ranges from 4500 to 6000 depending on whom you ask. I don't believe that DB2/MVS ever had the largest market share in the RDBMS world. The typical numbers that I've seen when all platforms are included put Oracle at about 40% with IBM at about 35% - but these numbers are at least 2 years old. One thing that is interesting is that IBM started claiming to be the largest relational database vendor with DB2 when they renamed all of their products (SQL/DS on VM, SQL/400 on AS/400, Database Manager on OS/2 all became DB2 of some sort). They particularly like to make this claim given the "popularity" of DB2/400. This is a database that every purchaser of an AS/400 receives. They make this claim even though I've seen some surveys that show 80% of AS/400 customers don't even know they have a relational database. Dave (ddargo@us.oracle.com)