IBM's Still On Top In Declining Relational Database Market

IBM was the relational-database market-share leader in 2002. But that market got significantly smaller.

New license revenue for relational-database software fell almost 7% last year to $6.6 billion from $7.1 billion in 2001, according to numbers released Wednesday by Gartner. That shows relational databases are not immune to the pressures of reduced IT spending, the market-research firm says.

IBM's $2.4 billion in relational-database sales, though down 0.8% from 2001, represented 36.2% of the 2002 market, up from its 33.9% the previous year. Strong sales growth for IBM's DB2 database on the company's zSeries line of servers helped make up for a double-digit sales decline on its iSeries platform, Gartner says.

Oracle's share of the market fell to 33.9% from 39.7% in 2001 as new license revenue plunged more than 20% to less than $2.3 billion. But Gartner says Oracle retained nearly a 2-to-1 lead over IBM in selling database software for Unix and Windows platforms.

Microsoft increased its share of the relational-database market to 18.0% in 2002 from 14.3% one year earlier as sales of its SQL Server database increased more than 16% to nearly $1.2 billion. Gartner says the Microsoft product appealed to increasingly cost-conscious businesses and benefited from its improved scalability.