Gustave,
I disagree with you. I think that sales of IFMX ORDBMS are only about 6 months behind where I would have projected them, and they should be growing quite well. IFMX generally does not break out the sales by product category (OLTP, data warehouse, ORDBMS, ...), but I expect that they will sell more licenses (dollar terms) this year on servers with the UDO (Universal Data Option) than ODIS will have license sales. Remember that two years ago (1996), Illustra had about $2-5M total license sales, so the growth rate is very high. Even so, the ORDBMS would be only about 10-15% of IFMX total license sales, at best in 1998.
I am basing this on a number of implementation PR's coming out of IFMX, rather than hard data.
Further, remember that Oracle will not have end-user or VAR definable objects until version 8.1, and I am not sure when that will be available. Right now, all you can get from Oracle are 5 prepackaged solutions that do not work well with each other (you cannot use spatial coordinates in a DBMS with video, and I do not even thing you will be able to combine them in the same table even in 8.1). All of the Oracle PR 1-2 years ago was nothing but a smoke screen for the fact that they were way behind IFMX and IBM. If you are looking at Oracle objects, you are looking in the wrong place for ORDBMS. Even Sybase appears to be well ahead of Oracle in this area.
Mark
|
