Oracle Widens Worldwide Database Market Lead

Oracle Widens Its Lead In The Worldwide Database Market According To Gartner's Dataquest

** Oracle Pulls Ahead By 3 Percentage Points in Market Share According to Report on 2000 Worldwide Database Market Report **

Oracle, the largest provider of software for e-business, has announced that Gartner's Dataquest statistics show that Oracle has widened its lead as the No. 1 vendor of database software, in the $8.8 billion dollar market, based on its estimates of worldwide database new license revenue in 2000. According to Dataquest's forthcoming report, Oracle increased its lead over its nearest competitor in the worldwide database market by more than three percentage points of market share. In the past year, Oracle has grown its worldwide database market share from 31.1 percent to 33.8 percent, while its nearest competitor's database market share grew 0.2 percent from 29.9 percent in 1999, to 30.1 percent in 2000. This is the fourth consecutive year that Oracle has led the database sector in market share.

Dataquest, a unit of Gartner Group, Inc. (NYSE: IT and ITB), released its findings today, citing an industry-wide 10 percent growth rate in database licences over 1999. Dataquest also found that Oracle's market share in UNIX climbed to 66.2 percent, the highest market share ever held by Oracle is this category. In the relational database market, the largest subset of the worldwide database market, Oracle increased its share to 42.1 percent up from 40.7 percent over 1999.

"The database market continues its trend of double digit growth this year, and the relational database market is particularly strong, while the non-relational and object database markets continue to decline. The market opportunity for database vendors is to provide expanded capabilities within the relational database model while also addressing new growth opportunities in support of applications, scalability and availability," said Colleen Graham, industry analyst for Gartner Dataquest's Information Management Software Group.

Over the past four years, Oracle has steadily increased its share in the worldwide database market from 29.9 percent in 1997 to 33.8 percent today, while many vendors have seen their worldwide database market share remain flat or decline severely due to competition or failure to advance their database technology. With the introduction of Oracle9i Database in June, Oracle is providing the market with the most advanced database technology available today. Oracle will also be the only database vendor able to aggressively address two growing market opportunities: the delivery of software as a service and the conversion of mainframe customers to the more cost-effective open systems. Oracle9i Real Application Clusters is the only relational database that can support mainframe levels of users and transactions on low-cost clustered hardware and run any application, hosted or otherwise, unchanged. Oracle9i Database will also extend Oracle's support for XML, Java, content management, business intelligence, security and availability beyond what is offered by any vendor in the market today.

"With Oracle9i, Oracle is aggressively going after new growing database market opportunities ranging from application hosting, to mainframe conversions, to the growing popularity of our database technology on Linux," said Rene Bonvanie, vice president of Oracle9i Marketing. "Oracle's market opportunity is not only good for database growth, but also for Oracle9i Application Server. It's a tightly-linked offering that no other vendor comes close to providing."

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