Open Source Impacting RDBMS Market

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Open Source Impacting RDBMS Market

By: David Utter
2006-05-25

Companies like Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft still dominate over 85 percent of the relational database management systems market, but open source versions of RDBMS products have been growing in adoption and capability.

Open Source Impacting RDBMS Market

Gartner (IT) reported 8.3 percent revenue growth in the worldwide RDBMS market for 2005. Total software revenue equaled $13.8 billion, with the majority of it going to the top three firms.

In the smallest revenue group, Gartner sees impressive results from the likes of MySQL and Ingres:

"The combined category of open source database management systems vendors, which includes MySQL and Ingres, showed the strongest growth, although it was one of the smallest revenue bases," said Colleen Graham, principal analyst at Gartner. "These open source DBMS products continue to improve in terms of functionality and scalability, and DBMS tool vendors are beginning to provide support for these offerings."

Open source software has had an impact on the way Gartner measures revenue for software companies. Instead of just considering new license revenue, they "measure market share in terms of total software revenue which includes revenue generated from new license, updates, subscriptions and hosting, technical support and maintenance."

In the open source world, giving away the software and selling support has been the method behind the rise of several projects. It's a modern twist on the fabled Gillette model of handing out razors and selling new blades to customers.

Gartner also provided this breakdown of the RDBMS market:

Worldwide 2005 Vendor Revenue Estimates from RDBMS Software,
Based on Total Software Revenue (Millions of Dollars)

Company	2005	2005 Market Share (%)	2004	2004 Market Share (%)	2004-2005 Growth (%)
Oracle	6,721.1	48.6	6,234.1	48.9	7.8
IBM	3,040.7	22.0	2,860.4	22.4	-6.3
Microsoft	2,073.2	15.0	1,777.9	13.9	16.6
Teradata	440.7	3.2	412.1	3.2	6.9
Sybase	407.0	2.9	382.8	3.0	6.3
Other Vendors	1,134.7	8.2	1,090.4	8.5	4.1
Total	13,817.4	100.0	12,757.8	100.0	8.3

Source: Gartner Dataquest (May 2006)

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Tags: Gartner, Database, MySQL, Ingres

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About the Author:
David Utter is a staff writer for InternetFinancialNews and WebProNews covering technology and business.


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