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

To: Michael Olin who wrote (10243)	3/24/1999 8:59:00 PM
From: Kevin Yang	Respond to of 19079

Oracle Widens Lead Over Microsoft In Databases IBM Moves Up In Unix/NT Database Sales By Shawn Willett San Jose, Calif. 6:15 PM EST Wed., Mar. 24, 1999 Oracle Corp. widened its lead over Microsoft Corp. in Windows NT databases license sales in 1998, while IBM Corp. is moving up quickly in the open systems (Unix/NT) database space, according to a report by Dataquest, a unit of GartnerGroup Inc. According to the report, Oracle now has a 46.1 percent market share with Oracle7/8 and OracleLite on NT, while Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft's SQL Server has a 29.7 percent market. IBM is seeing fast market-share growth with its open systems DB2 product, called UDB, growing to 9.7 percent on NT database sales and 7.3 percent of Unix sales on Unix, up from 7.1 percent and 4.7 percent, respectively. Janet Perna, general manager of the data management group at IBM, said the numbers mean IBM is poised to take over the No. 3 slot in client/server databases from Informix Corp. if current trends continue. "Our growth on the NT platform year over year was 100 percent, our growth on Unix was 70 percent, if you look at the overall database market it is growing at 15 percent, we are growing significantly faster than the market," said Perna. The indirect sales now account for 25 percent of UDB sales, up from 15 percent a year ago, she said, adding that carefully cultivated relationships with ISVs and enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors are driving the fast growth of UDB. "We now have 10,000 applications and over 6500 business partners. That has really been a critical success factor for us," said Perna. Price is also a factor in IBM's battle with Oracle for market share, Perna said."We are about 1/3 less expensive than Oracle," she said. Oracle disputed the pricing claim. Meanwhile Oracle executives were claiming victory over Microsoft with the new market-share numbers. "Microsoft has had a major loss in market share," said Chuck Rozwat, senior vice president of servers at Oracle, Redwood Shores, Calif. "We think it is because of their lack of ability to scale and the new thin-client architectures where they do poorly," said Rozwat. The numbers do not take into account either SQL Server 7.0 or Oracle8i, both of which recently began shipping. But the 14-point spread represents a widening of Oracle's 3-point lead in 1997 on the NT platform. Oracle retains an overwhelming lead in the Unix relational database category, with a 61 percent share. Meanwhile, Oracle executives said IBM's lead in the overall market was misleading since it takes into account non-relational proprietary mainframe databases such as IMS. IBM slightly edged out Oracle for the top spot for all database systems for 1998. "Eight-eight percent of their sales are for prehistoric platforms," said Ken Jacobs, vice president of data server marketing at Oracle. "They have a captive audience. ... I think because of Y2K you saw this uptick in sales," he added