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Technology Stocks : Oracle Corporation (ORCL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mark Palmberg who wrote (11318)	7/13/1999 12:42:00 PM
From: OverSold	Respond to of 19079

Good News for ORCL To print: Select File and then Print from your browser's menu -------------------------------------------------------------- This story was printed from ZDNN, located at zdnet.com. -------------------------------------------------------------- Database growth bounces back By Ed Sperling & Ben Elgin, Sm@rt Reseller July 13, 1999 6:09 AM PT URL: zdnet.com The database market is roaring back to life after nearly two years of slow growth, and integrators say this is just the first wave of what will be a spike in e-commerce apps that rely on huge data warehouses. In the past quarter, database sales at integrator CTSinc.net rose nearly 40 percent, says Mark Webb, VP of professional services. "What we're seeing are a lot of new Internet start-ups with no infrastructure, and a lot of companies putting down the building blocks for e-commerce." Sales likewise are up at database companies. Oracle Corp. (Nasdaq:ORCL) recently wowed Wall Street when it disclosed strong Q4 income and Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT) says SQL Server licenses now top 6 million seats. Informix Corp. (Nasdaq:INFX) is once again profitable, and Sybase Inc. (Nasdaq:SYBS) has fought its way back from losses to post moderate growth for the past five quarters. Pamela George, Sybase's VP of corporate marketing, attributes the comeback to the rapid deployment needs of customers, coupled with the vendor's focus both on resellers and on three vertical markets, namely financial services, telecommunications and health care. "The whole 'build vs. buy' mentality has been reversed," George says. "In the past, you'd spend three years and build your own. Now what's happening is businesses are buying into products that provide 20 percent customization." Sybase is focusing on enterprise information portals-apps that let you gather data in an enterprise and turn it into usable information. IBM (NYSE:IBM) has taken a similar tack with business intelligence apps. "These are becoming the new mission-critical applications," says Hershel Harris, IBM's director of database technology. "Customers are building larger and larger warehouses to support multi-terabyte databases." Hershel says other drivers are transactions over the Web. But the most intriguing are process management and biz-to-biz uses. In this setting, high-availability and failover are prerequisites, and they're all based on big databases. But booming sales aren't going to translate into proportionally high windfalls for vendors and database resellers. The reason? Database margins are dropping thanks to Microsoft's lowball pricing. Still, savvy VARs can tap the database pipeline and build high-margin e-biz solutions.