Oracle says it's still king, dominates Linux, as IBM takes overall RDBMS crown

Rethink IT, July, 2004

Oracle is in a bit of a pout. It says that no matter what a well respected research group that it won't name says, customers and analysts agree that Oracle remains first in the modern relational database market, and it says it loudly, if somewhat unclearly, from its web site.

What's triggered all this is a report from Garner; which counts all sales of relational database software by vendor and which places IBM ahead of Oracle. It showed that IBM makes more money from RDBMS, even without adding in Informix revenues, than Oracle, with IBM sales coming in at $2.38bn this year, up $143.5m, or 6.5% without factoring the $134m Informix business, which is slowly sliding.

Oracle recorded second place with license revenues of $2,299.3m, up $53m on last year or 2.4%.

Oracle's statement is perhaps understandable when you take a look at the Linux marketplace that it already, dominates, where Gartner admits it is up 158% over lasts year to $299m, with more than 69% going to Oracle. Oracle's numbers on Linux shows a staggering 360.8% improvement to get there, while IBM trails meekly in second place with just 28.5% of the Linux market.

Oracle has had to make the biggest change in tactics in the database market, in order to replace the decaying Unix dominance that it once boasted. But it shouldn't really be too difficult given that Linux is increasingly, becoming the replacement for Unix, and Oracle already has the ear of those sites.

New license revenue for the Unix market fell 5.9% in a market where Oracle 57% of new license revenue.

Oracle's guarded response was to say that "Oracle remains, by far, the market share leader in the modern relational database market ie Unix, Linux and Windows platforms. Particularly in the new, rapidly expanding Linux market, Oracle is solidifying its position, with the highest growth and largest market share of any, vendor."

It then implied that the figures from other vendors were uncheckable because they did not have audited revenue figures.

The fact that the overall market has grown should cause a bit of relief among all the RDBMS vendors, because it shrank in 2002 by 6%, however an unspecified amount of the growth was due to the weak dollar and Rethink would suggest that it is most of it, and that perhaps the market is effectively flat.

Gartner analysts said IBM'S growth was generated by its DB2 on the iSeries and zSeries platforms

Microsoft also made a strong showing, which perhaps may not be sustained as the market begins to move in earnest to Linux, where it doesn't play. Microsoft license RDBMS revenues were $1.3bn against $1.19bn, a rise of 11% and a market share of almost 18%.

The only other organization listed was NCR Teradata.

RDBMS overall on the Windows server platform showed a slight improvement in 2003 with new license revenue reaching $2.8bn across all of the suppliers, a 3.8% increase from 2002. Microsoft extended its market share in this segment to 47.3%, from 44.3% in 2002.

Total license revenue from all the vendors analyzed was just over $7bn.

In recent U5 news coverage Oracle boasted that over 9,000 developers are set to create Oracle products based on Linux and that this leverage would come into play in the last quarter of this year.