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Relational database vendors are on the hot seat. Faced with users demanding more stable and sophisticated database technology as well as Microsoft's omnipresent threat, they've been forced to speed product development and delivery.
The result: A crunch on Oracle, Sybase, Informix, IBM, and Computer Associates-Ingres. These vendors are desperately trying to meet market demands by staying ahead of their competitors' technology advances.
"Users are raising the bar on database technology," says Rob Tholemeier, a senior analyst at the Meta Group Inc. consulting firm's Burlingame, Calif., office. "They are jumping to add new technology to the same old database."
Then there's Microsoft, which stands ready to seize the enterprise. Today the software titan controls only 3% of the worldwide market for database server software (see chart). But tomorrow?
Perhaps the greatest pressure is on Oracle in Redwood Shores, Calif. Oracle dominates database server software, controlling more than 35% of a nearly $2 billion worldwide market. While the company's financial health is excellent, Oracle saw its market share drop by a tenth of a percent last year, according to International Data Corp., a research firm in Framingham, Mass.
In Unix databases which represents more than 80% of the total database business Oracle's share dropped by more than 1%. Meanwhile, its primary competitors Sybase and Informix gained 1% and 2% in market share, respectively. "Being No. 1 is nice," says Jerry Held, senior VP of server technology at Oracle. "But being No. 1 and pulling away from the pack is much nicer." To fight back, Oracle extended its Oracle 7 core database into new markets. Its Media Server, which allows multimedia storage, has impressed users. And the company's March 28 announcement of multidimensional database technology, which quickly answers complex business queries involving geographic information, should strengthen Oracle's position as a technology leader.
Oracle must still mind customers who want parallelization, replication, and scalability. CEO Larry Ellison has made parallelization the highest priority for his engineering team. While Oracle's Parallel Query option carries an additional charge, it is integrated in Oracle's core database technology and can be activated on request.
For scalability, the company maintains that Oracle 7 has run on multiple-processor systems of as many as 64 processors in lab tests. But so far no corporate user...