Re: Database market share 2004

rkusenet wrote: > http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1820667,00.asp > > > > > The database market grew by 10.3 percent in 2004, fueled largely by hunger for business > intelligence and analytics, according to numbers released by the Gartner Group on Monday. > With 34.1 percent of the overall market, IBM holds a slim margin over its closest > competitor, Oracle Corp., which maintains 33.7 percent of the overall market. Microsoft > Corp. follows up with 20 percent of the market. NCR Teradata Corp. controls 2.9 percent, > Sybase Inc. claims 2.3 percent and others hold 6.6 percent. ADVERTISEMENT > The market growth figure doubles that of RDBMS (relational DBMS) market growth in 2003, > which was 5 percent, according to Gartner Inc.'s Colleen Graham, who authored the report. > "[The growth] came a lot from BI, data warehousing and data analysis," she said. "You can > tell that if you look at [NCR]; they had really strong growth, and they're a > data-warehousing database. That's where we're seeing a lot of this come from." > The market grew from just under $7.1 billion in 2003 to nearly $7.8 billion in terms of new > license sales. The continuing weakness of the U.S. dollar artificially inflated market > growth to some degree, Graham said, accounting for some 3 to 4 percent of overall growth. > "[Overall market growth] was probably somewhere between 6 and 7 percent," she said, after > considering that sales outside of the United States, when converted to U.S. dollars, > contributed more to vendor revenue because of currency conversion, as opposed to increased > demand. > Microsoft and Teradata led in terms of overall growth, with 18 percent and 17 percent, > respectively. However, there was no clear winner in market share overall. Because the > difference between RDBMS revenue for IBM and Oracle was less than $30 million, it is > statistically too close to declare a winner, according to the report, titled "No Clear > Winner in Overall RDBMS Market Share Race." > Read details here about Oracle's PIM Data Hub. > Winner or no winner, vendors were quick to point out the rosy parts of the picture. > Willie Hardie, Oracle's senior director of Database Product Marketing, found evidence that > the market is buying into the database company's grid vision and its pushing of RAC (Real > Application Clusters) clustering on commodity servers running on the Linux platform. > "Forget about databases specifically and look at server sales," said Hardie, in Redwood > Shores, Calif. "The growth market in servers is in small servers, with clustering of small > servers. That matches closely to Oracle's grid model: don't buy big servers; cluster > together boxes running Linux or Windows. No doubt there's a trend in the industry moving in > that direction, somewhat reflected in Oracle's growth in 2004." > The market for RDBMS on Linux, meanwhile, is red-hot. While still a relatively small part of > the overall RDBMS market, the Linux segment grew 118 percent in 2004, more than doubling > from $300 million in 2003 to more than $650 million in 2004. > Gartner found that Oracle has a growing lead over IBM in this subsection of the market, with > growth of 155 percent. Oracle now controls 80.5 percent of the Linux RDBMS market, up from > 69 percent a year ago. IBM, meanwhile, slipped in 2004, coming to rest at 16.5 percent of > the market from year-ago figures of 28.4 percent of the market. > The Gartner report pointed out that Linux RDBMS revenue includes sales of Oracle 9i RAC, > which adds about a 50 percent premium on top of regular RDBMS license fees for that company. > Bob Picciano, vice president of database servers for IBM, said Oracle's growing Linux lead > is artificially puffed up by those add-on RAC fees. "What Oracle is doing is, they're > migrating their own Unix base to the Linux platform," said Picciano, in Somers, N.Y. "In the > process, they're increasing the cost of software to those clients, by introducing the cost > of RAC." > > "Few users are acquiring Oracle for the Linux platform without the RAC option," the Gartner > report states. "Almost 20 percent to 30 percent of Oracle RAC deployments are estimated to > be on the Linux platform." > Hardie said the demand for Linux shows no signs of abating, coming from virtually all the > vertical industries and including implementations of data warehousing on clustered RAC-that > clearly not being a solution for the needs of a niche, he said. > IBM is set to fight back with DB2 features that compete with RAC. In particular, the > company's release of "Stinger," the next version of DB2, is optimized for Version 2.6 of the > Linux kernel, a move that's geared toward helping database clusters scale higher and perform > faster. > It is also intended to better exploit the speed of 64-bit databases and servers that rely on > multiple processors. > IBM's promise is that such multiprocessor servers can be joined in Linux clusters, as with > DB2 ICE (Integrated Cluster Environment), an integrated package that combines DB2 and > eServer Linux Cluster 1350 (xSeries, 325, BladeCenter) to provide a solution that, according > to IBM, can cluster from two to 1,000 servers and pick up nodes at the rate of four per > hour. > Picciano also pointed to Stinger's HADR (High Availability and Disaster Recovery) as being > the key to IBM's ability to deliver high availability at a fraction of the cost of Oracle > RAC. > "With RAC, the client needs to license all the processors on both boxes, and they need to > license the RAC feature," he said. "With HADR, you pay for processors on the primary [box] > and for one processor on the standby box. So the cost savings is much greater." > Picciano said that HADR has helped IBM do battle in sales situations where IBM and Microsoft > are in the room. "We're winning 89.4 percent of the time we're engaging against Oracle and > Microsoft" according to Q1 2005 numbers, he said, thanks not only to HADR but also to a > retrained sales team and the decision to price servers at the chip level rather than the > core level. > Microsoft, predictably, scoffed at the growth of the Linux database market. "Look at it: > It's a small market," said Tom Rizzo, director of product management for SQL Server. "You'd > expect some growth there, from such a small base." > Rizzo pointed to the healthy growth in the Windows database market as evidence that Windows > is "eating away at the Linux camp" rather than the other way around. The RDBMS market on the > Windows server platform grew 10 percent in 2004. Microsoft's market share grew 18 percent in > this segment. > Click here to read more about the increasing market share of open-source database > PostgreSQL. > That gave Microsoft 50.9 percent of the Windows RDBMS market, up from 47.4 percent in 2003. > IBM posted a 4 percent decline in this market segment, which followed a nearly 12 percent > decline in 2003-a slippage Gartner attributed to weak adoption of DB2 8. > Graham said she was surprised to see Microsoft do so well, given that the release of SQL > Server 2005, code-named Yukon, has been delayed so often and so long. > "We do our forecast and say 'OK, each of these vendors, which is coming out with a new > product?

http://www.fabalabs.org/research/papers/FabalabsResearchPaper-OSDBMS-Eval.pdf