Oracle goes on the defensive
Published: 09 May 2002 07:32 BST
Oracle is challenging a research report that says the software maker has lost ground to IBM in the database market.
The report, released by Gartner Dataquest on Tuesday, said Oracle had slipped to second place, with about 32 percent market share in the overall database market. IBM had 34.6 percent of the revenue in the overall database market in 2001, according to the report.
But in a statement on Wednesday, Oracle said that the wrong data was examined in the report, and challenged IBM and Microsoft to provide "audited numbers" to analyst firms.
"Oracle is challenging assumptions that Oracle is losing market share to competitors given that a review of independent research and the activities of Oracle's install base does not support this," according to the statement, which was attributed to Oracle chief financial officer Jeff Henley.
"The revenue and growth data provided to the industry analysts by the vendors themselves is not independently validated, outside of Oracle's," Henley continued in the statement.
Representatives from Gartner and Microsoft were not immediately available for comment on Wednesday.
Lori Bosio, an IBM spokeswoman, said: "About two years ago Oracle said, 'IBM's not even a player in the database space.' But since about 18 months ago they have been reacting to our momentum."
"DB2 has grown for 20 consecutive quarters," Bosio said. "We've grown double digits on Unix and Windows. And it's interesting that the details weren't suspect until IBM became No. 1."
Oracle also said that the report examines the overall database market, including older database software running on mainframe systems, instead of the modern database market "comprising Unix, Linux and Windows NT." Oracle said that only IBM benefits from the use of overall market share numbers, since much of Big Blue's database revenue comes from software installed on older systems.
The study found that IBM's DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 databases gained market share compared with Oracle's 9i database in all categories, although Oracle still dominated the $3bn Unix market in 2001.
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