NT Is in the Cards for Oracle

ENT,  Feb 4, 1998  by Jim LeFevre

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The Oracle/Unisys initiatives will focus on integrating Oracle's products -- including the Oracle Parallel Server, the Oracle Data Mart Suite and Oracle's Network Computing Architecture -- with various Unisys hardware and software products.

Unisys already is one of the top five worldwide Oracle resellers and currently resells Oracle's full line of enterprise-class software products. The new initiative will result in a new variety of Windows NT solutions, such as a data mart solution based on Oracle8 and Unisys' Aquanta XR/6 10-way SMP server.

Unisys, a company with a history of financial troubles, has recently reorganized its business structure and embraced the Windows NT platform. The deal with Oracle is designed to strengthen the company's Windows NT push into the enterprise.

"Oracle and Unisys have enjoyed a long-standing relationship with mutual success based on the ability to provide the right product for diverse organizations and support those companies on a worldwide basis," says Gary Bloom, Oracle senior vice president of the system products division. "Unisys and Oracle will apply a similar business model to the Windows NT market."

While the Unisys deal will ultimately help Oracle push more of its products into the enterprise market, the company might not need that much assistance doing so. Both Dataquest (San Jose, Calif.) and International Data Corp. (IDC, Framingham, Mass.) have published reports that indicate that Oracle's Universal Data Server has become the market-leading Windows NT database.

The Dataquest study, which focused on the overall Windows NT database market between 1994 and 1996, found that Oracle's Universal Data Server has made steady gains in market share over the 3-year period, with a rise to 39.3 percent in 1996. By contrast, Microsoft SQL Server showed a decline in market share, ending 1996 at 37.2 percent, down from a high of 50.4 percent.

In the same study, Dataquest found that the Windows NT database market is booming, having grown from $172.1 million in 1995 to $454.1 million in 1996.

Carolyn DiCenzo, Dataquest director of client/server software, says that as Windows NT becomes more and more popular with application developers, new opportunities are created for database vendors. "The fastest growth is in the enterprise space where Oracle has done a great job of reinforcing to customers its proven track record in this high-stakes arena." This is a space, according to DiCenzo, where customers need not only a strong product, but also services and integration support.

IDC results reveal the same story: Its figures for Windows NT relational database revenues revealed that Oracle's Universal Data Server grew 223 percent in 1996 over the 1995 year, when the company had trailed a distant second to market leader Microsoft. According to the IDC report, Oracle's Windows NT market share rose from 24.8 percent in 1995 to 30.3 percent in 1996, while Microsoft's NT database revenues dropped nearly 10 points in the same period, from 40 percent to 30.9 percent.

IDC also charted a $145 million jump in Oracle's NT revenue in 1996.

"The acceptance of Windows NT as a suitable relational database platform and the accompanying surge in database sales during 1996 seems to have caught most of the industry napping," says Carl Olofson, IDC application development tools research director, who says that although Microsoft has used its vast market share to push SQL Server into the marketplace, the real gains have been made by Oracle. "Oracle has seemingly brushed aside Sybase and Informix, and appears singularly poised to challenge Microsoft for database market leadership."

Top Five Worldwide Windows NT Database Engine/Server License

                1995     Share    1996     Share       Growth
Microsoft      $105.0m   40.0%   $213.8m   30.9%       103.7%
Oracle          $65.0m   24.8%   $210.0m   30.3%       223.0%
Informix         $3.8m    1.4%    $49.3m    7.1%     1,203.0%
IBM              $0.5m    0.2%    $31.2m    4.5%     6,142.2%
Sybase          $16.0m    6.1%    $28.3m    4.1%        76.2%

Source: IDC

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