Re: Is that true: IBM overtakes Oracle in total database sales

The reason IBM jumped ahead was the purchase of Informix. This added ~4% to it's total sales, and pushed IBM ahead of Oracle. If you look at products, Oracle as a product still leads. Also, Y2K provided IBM a big one time boost. Many file based database systems on mainframes were converted to DB2, and IBM made a very good business move by making this as painless as possible. IBM has made some very good decisions with respect to increasing market share.

Some healthy competition pushing the leaders back and forth is a *good* thing. If pushing Oracle back makes the company hungry so that it improves its TPC benchmarks and lowers prices, I am all for it. More than once I have seen customers chose other products purely on price. Most commonly, this means picking MS SQL Server over Oracle, and not DB2.

I think Oracle's decision to support Linux better than it had was a very good one. I think Oracle's changes to forms 9i from 6i were well chosen. I also believe Oracle's restructuring of prices was a move in the right direction. However, Oracle tends to require more hardware and its prices are higher than other products. There is a great deal of room for improvement that could allow Oracle to dominate once again.

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Chris Weiss
mailto:chris_at_hpdbe.com
www.hpdbe.com
High Performance Database Engineering
Available for long and short term contracts


"Elao" <elao_at_erie.cido.agn.com> wrote in message
news:abbjvq$ovu1_at_imsp212.netvigator.com...


> I heard that IBM is now overtakes Oracle in total database sales. Is that

> true? (I heard that one of the reasons why the sales of Oracle is now in

2nd


> place is the prices of Oracle9i are so expensive now)

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