Oracle Again No. 1 Database Software Shop
Mon Mar 10, 6:37 PM ET
PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) - Research firm International Data Corp. (IDC) on Monday said Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq:ORCL - news) maintained its top position among database vendors in 2002, but that Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) and International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM - news) were closing the gap.
Oracle retained its dominance of the relational and object-relational database management system software (RDBMS) market, "at least for the time being," IDC said in its report.
Relational database management software sales account for the lion's share of total database software revenues. IDC said the RDBMS market was nearly flat from 2001.
Oracle's share of the market slipped to 39.4 percent from 41.7 percent in 2001. IBM's market share grew to 33.6 percent from 31 percent last year, while Microsoft rounded out the top three with 11.1 percent share -- up from 9.7 percent the year earlier.
"In general, vendors dependent on large systems deployments, such as Oracle and Sybase, suffered," IDC said.
Sybase Inc.(NYSE:SY - news) came in at No. 4 with 3.6 percent market share in 2002, down from 3.8 percent in 2001.
IDC said vendors that could find ways to grow revenue by selling lower-cost solutions to small- and medium-sized organizations, or to departments or project groups in larger companies, fared better.
During the current corporate spending slump, Oracle has seen its moderately priced, stripped-down "standard edition" database move better than its expensive, high-end "enterprise edition" product.
Competing database products from Microsoft and IBM have fewer functions and security features than Oracle's high-end product and compete more directly with Oracle's standard edition software.
IBM sells a broad range of database software, including products for older mainframe systems. The company and some research firms say it is the No. 1 overall software vendor according to revenue.
Looking to this year, IDC said it "has been getting a sense that there is some thawing of budgets for large enterprise databases in these first two months of 2003."
The research firm -- which looks at financial reports, talks to database vendors, and uses "select" anecdotal information to come up with its rankings -- said it is too early to call an end to the corporate freeze on high-tech spending. It also warned that terrorist attacks or a conflict in Iraq (news - web sites) could further disrupt sales.
Nevertheless, IDC said, "there is some reason for an optimistic view that enterprise RDBMS sales could be flat to even up slightly in 2003, which would be good news for the market generally and for Oracle and Sybase in particular."
On March 18, Oracle is slated to post results from its fiscal quarter ended February.
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