Sharise and Thread,
IBM DB2 Attacks ERP Market
crn.com
By ShawnWillett
San Jose, Calif.
1:11 PM EST Sun., Jan. 17, 1999
..............
IBM is betting that DB2 for Unix/NT will be the next big platform for
ERP applications.
The company is investing heavily in optimizing its DB2 for Unix and NT
database to run with ERP applications and is leveraging its mainframe
influence with the ERP vendors.
"There is a huge pent up demand for ERP on the 390 and NT is an
untapped market," said Jeff Jones, brand manager for DB2 at IBM.
So far, IBM has targeted the big three ERP vendors - SAP, Peoplesoft,
and The Baan Co.
IBM has opened an SAP integration center in Santa Teresa, Calif.and
has made numerous modifications to DB2 to make it run better with SAP
R/3's data formats. It also has a Quickstart installation process with
SAP.
For Peoplesoft, IBM is also investing money in modifying and integrating
its database for Peoplesoft's suite of ERP applications. IBM has similar
efforts with Baan.
"They [Peoplesoft] have had a 160 percent revenue increase on the DB2
database." said Jones.
According to Jones, there has always been interest among ERP vendors
in porting their applications to the IBM's 390 platform. Recently the
vendors started targeting NT for DB2 as their newest platform.
Jones said that IBM has an advantage over other database providers,
claiming that Oracle Corp. has product conflict with ERP vendors, while
Microsoft Corp. and Sybase Inc., which have scaleability issues, he said.
"Sybase and Microsoft are extremely late in offering row level locking
in their products, but we've had it in the whole life of the product," said
Jones.
Row level locking provides the ability for two people to work on the
same record at the same time.
According to a study by Boston-based AMR Research, IBM DB2 was
the number two database for ERP applications with a 20 percent market
share. Oracle was number one with a whopping 52 percent market share.
IBM's numbers included mainframe and AS/400 platforms. |
