Daniel,
What makes this year different from any other? It's always
backwards-looking, but that's the only way to capture actual data.
Larry Edelstein
DA Morgan wrote:
> 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? Where's each one been in the product
>> lifecycle?'" she said. "To see Microsoft have growth this strong, even
>> before they release Yukon, that struck me as interesting. People
>> aren't waiting."
>>
>> Much of Microsoft's success likely goes back to the overall interest
>> in BI, Graham said-a premise that Rizzo seconded. "BI is a tremendous
>> growth driver for us, especially Reporting Services, which we've seen
>> a ton of customers buying and deploying," he said.
>> "That's why we invested so heavily in BI technologies across SQL
>> Server. We put a down payment many years ago, and now it's paying off
>> in terms of revenue growth," Rizzo added, pointing to the company's
>> release of OLAP (online analytical processing) services in 1998, which
>> was the first of a string of BI technologies integrated into the
>> database itself.
>> "People looked at us like we were kind of crazy," Rizzo said. "[They
>> asked,] 'Why is Microsoft integrating BI into the database? Most
>> people buy it separately.' We're saying . integrate it seamlessly into
>> the database. All the people who thought we had four heads and eight
>> eyes, you look at the strategies of our competitors, they're starting
>> to go down the same path we started down years ago."
>
>
> My only criticism of this is that it is backward ... not forward
> looking. Well that and the fact that it is from Gartner Group which
> means it is irrelevant.
Received on Mon May 30 2005 - 13:21:35 CDT
