Global CIO: In Database Wars, Microsoft Says It Gets No Respect

"We think that makes it much easier for the customer. They don't have to buy all the individual parts and glue them together, but instead they buy the boxes: a high-margin product for us and a high-value purchase for them because they don't have to spend a lot of money on systems integration," said Ellison.

"We think that's the way customers are gonna go forward as they build their data centers: not buying components but buying systems like Exadata."

So if Microsoft's and Oracle's strategic approaches are similar—and by these descriptions, they certainly are—then the keys to success in this rapidly changing marketplace for both companies will be a combination of commodity hardware running powerful and flexible software in a combination of settings: traditional on-premise systems, private clouds, SaaS applications, and the increasingly frothy world of highly optimized and integrated systems.

Although Microsoft's only been deeply focused on the enterprise for just 10 years, Saburi said, he believes that the marketplace is demonstrating that Microsoft's products are up to the challenge. And in describing the wildly complex infrastructures from which many CIOs are now desperately trying to escape to begin their journey to that more-flexible and less-expensive future, Saburi used a great metaphor:

"Big-company CIOs built IT systems that were like Formula One racing cars and their IT organizations were like the Formula One pit crews," Saburi said. "Extremely knowledgeable and powerful, but also extremely expensive and limited in how they're able to do things and in what tools they could use. And that just doesn't match the budget or strategic focus of IT organizations today—our customers today require IT infrastructure that's highly elastic and highly efficient."

So Microsoft's leveraging new chipsets from Intel and AMD that can scale up to truly mission critical apps via today's 8-way servers and 64 logical cores, Saburi, and getting ready for the 16-way and 32-way devices that are coming. "All that power used to be extremely expensive, and now or pretty soon it'll be running on x64 plus Windows with SQL Server."

Ah yes, SQL Server—something of a sore spot for Saburi, who, along with Microsoft's PR agency, leaned hard on recent reports from both Gartner and IDC showing that Microsoft has narrowed the gap with IBM and Oracle in enterprise-database revenue and now holds third place with an 18.6% share.

In fact, Saburi said, Gartner's recent database roundup showed that Microsoft's 2009 database revenue grew 3.2% while revenues at both Oracle (-1.8%) and IBM (-2.0%) actually declined.

"Customers today have many clusters of information throughout their businesses and they're trying to make more sense out of those islands of information," he said. "They want—they need—to make better use of their data, whether for something like SarBox requirements or complying with local regulatory issues, or to make faster decisions.

"We think part of our advantage is that a common theme we're hearing from customers is that they need not only a fully robust database but also along with that a fully compatible composite app like SharePoint to help them architect the future solutions they'll need."

And pointing to that strong performance in databases versus Oracle and IBM, Saburi insisted that Microsoft has mastered the ability to deliver whatever its enterprise customers will need in moving from the old IT model to the new."

"For at least the short term and maybe longer, there's strong demand for data warehousing appliances, and we think there'll always be a time and a place for them so we'll participate," he said. "And there will always be Formula One cars, the big systems—if there's enough demand, we'll deliver on that as well.What I can say is that the data warehousing appliance will be first, and that there will be more after that.

"At the same time, we know we need to be in a position to help our customers make the journey to the cloud," Saburi said, "to having a highly elastic infrastructure that lets them shift their IT operations model from 24/7 to 9-to-5. So we're fully prepared to continue investing in not only the traditional Formula One stuff those CIOs need, but also cloud-type stuff, particularly as we're finding that the ability to have a centralized database running in the cloud is a very attractive proposition for many companies."

If Microsoft's able to (a) deliver on all those promises, and (b) continue offering "very attractive propositions" with SQL Server across all the types of platforms its CIO customers are demanding, and (c) continue adding database share while Oracle and IBM decline, then it's likely that Saburi and his colleagues will begin getting that hard-earned respect they feel has been lacking.

RECOMMENDED READING: Global CIO: Larry Ellison & The New Oracle Rock The Tech World Global CIO: In Database Wars, Oracle Blasts Microsoft And IBM Global CIO: IBM's Bank Outage: Anatomy Of A Disaster Global CIO: The CEO Of The Year Is SAP's Bill McDermott Global CIO: IBM Doubles Down On Red-Hot Optimized Systems Global CIO: Oracle's Top 10 Retail-Industry Insights Global CIO: Microsoft Joins Oracle & IBM In Rise Of The Machines Global CIO: Oracle Reveals Strategy & Customers For White-Hot Exadata Global CIO: Larry Ellison's Hardware Boasts Are Nonsense, Says IBM Global CIO: Larry Ellison's IBM-Slayer Is Oracle Exadata Machine Global CIO: Oracle Layoffs Threaten Larry Ellison's Credibility Global CIO: How SAP Is Leading The Mobile-Enterprise Revolution Global CIO: SAP's Top 10 Priorities To Become Undisputed #1 Global CIO: Oracle's Larry Ellison Declares War On IBM And SAP Bob Evans is senior VP and director of InformationWeek's Global CIO unit.

To find out more about Bob Evans, please visit his page.

For more Global CIO perspectives, check out Global CIO,
or write to Bob at [email protected].