A Reuters article on some research done by IDC appearing on ITWeb) had a comment on the market share of various database vendors. Measuring revenue, the leaders were, in order, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.
The article was unsatisfactory for a number of reasons:
- there’s no indication of whether OSS vendors had their revenue included (whether from support or commercial licences)
- the influence of the OSS DBMS’s sounds is referred to in the same way Microsoft mentions Linux. IDC says database deployments grew faster than revenues due to strong downward price pressure caused by tight competition among the big three vendors and a little bit by the presence of open source
- and best of all, the real OSS DBMS to be worried about is, yes, you guessed it, that flagship of OSS database adoption in the enterprise, Linux. I quote: all three companies will also face continued competitive pressures from open source database products, such as Linux.
IDC are the self-proclaimed premier global market intelligence and advisory firm in the information technology and telecommunications industries. Perhaps the error slipped in with Reuters or ITweb, but I suspect not. Either way, I pity the company basing decision upon this premier information.