Open source will challenge Oracle Kingdom

Oracle continues to dominate the database market, but analysts say open source will be the company's biggest competitor.

Market research firm IDC and Gartner predict that the global performance of relational database management system (RDBMS) software will continue to grow, while enterprise data storage requirements remain the main source of market expansion. The system is primarily used to store, manipulate, or recover data.

Both Gartner and IDC assessed the global 2005 RDBMS software Sales report released this week.

Analysts say the biggest threat to Oracle's kingdom will be open source competitors such as MySQL. The popularity of open source software may change the way that RDBMS products are priced and authorized and subvert the status quo.

"These open source (database management system) products are evolving in functionality and utility, and DBMS vendors are beginning to support these products," Gartner's chief analyst, Colleen Graham, said in a statement. ”

But Oracle insists that the challenge of open source code is not enough to fear.

Willie Hardie, vice president of the company's database marketing, told CNET News.com: "IDC does not explicitly point out the number of open source vendors, and Gartner calculates that their overall market share is less than 1%." So that's not much of a number and I don't even think they deserve to be mentioned. ”

Gartner analyst does not agree. While open source software vendors such as MySQL and Ingres accounted for less than 1% of the overall market in 2005, Graham said, they grew by as much as 47%.

"We think it's a big deal," Graham said. Even if they are a very small role in the current DBS market, don't forget that Linux is not a very small role about 10 years ago? Now is not to be overlooked. ”

Gartner says that with Oracle, Linux has become the fastest-growing operating system for RDBMS, surpassing Unix at 84% growth rates.

IDC says the rise of open source is mainly due to the support of a younger generation of developers. Gartner owes it to the maturity of the open source paradigm rather than generational differences. Two companies believe this trend will spur market change.

"Open source code is generally started from a small age, but in the end it has a significant impact," says Graham. Oracle understands this. They have acquired an Open-source company on their own because they want to keep up with the trend. She mentioned the commercial software maker's acquisition of Sleepycat Spftware.

She added: "We expect them (Open-source database software providers) to get more market and possibly very fast." ”

The research company said in its report that while developing countries continued to grow, the lower prices in these areas made them unprofitable and could not have enough impact on the overall market. The main performance growth is still in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Africa and other regions.

Oracle was the first in 2005 with 6.5 billion dollars and 44.6% market share, while IBM kept second in 21.4% market share, followed by 16.8% in Microsoft. IDC believes that SQL Server 2005 will help Microsoft continue to pursue.

Gartner's 2005 global performance was $13.8 billion, an increase of 8.3% from the previous year. Oracle's global market share is as high as 48.9%, and IBM and Microsoft, the second and third-ranked, are lagging far behind.

Oracle's performance last year was largely derived from the high demand for data availability and storage, and the popularity of its commercial 10g database software. 10g can be paired with clusters, multiple server group operations, which Oracle calls the real application Cluster, or RAC technology.

"Through clustering, you can put Oracle database application software data and storage applications on a server farm that shares the same database," Hardie said. You can use this server farm for all the servers and processing power. You can eliminate a single host failure problem. ”

The cluster, says Graham, is not only an innovative option but also an aid to Oracle's business plan.

"Each time they sell RAC, they gain more than they sell the Oracle system," she said. As a result, the cost of hardware is reduced in terms of corporate customers, but Oracle gains a little. ”

But prices could change. IDC predicts Oracle and IBM will take a price reduction strategy for developers and small companies to counter Microsoft's growth in the market. According to its own analysis, IDC believes that Microsoft created "the strongest annual growth" last year, which could erode Oracle's market.

"As the software market continues to shift, we anticipate that the software licensing model will change," Oracle said in a statement. ”