IDC REPORT REVEALS ORACLE LEADS THE DW TOOLS MARKET

According to IDC Research Inc, Oracle Corp, one of the largest providers of software for e-business, leads the exponentially growing, multibillion-dollar data warehousing tools market. In its recent report, Data Warehousing Tools: Market Forecast and Analysis, 2000-2004, IDC revealed that Oracle was the overall revenue leader of the $5.3 billion data warehousing tools market with a 21 percent market share. Based on 1999 revenues for the combined market of data warehousing generation, management and information access tools, Oracle sustained its leadership position relative to competing data warehousing tools vendors.

"IDC believes that data warehousing helps companies to increase their operating efficiency and discover new business opportunities," said Dan Vesset, senior analyst, IDC. "While Oracle's leadership in the data warehousing tools market is due in large part to its dominance over the database management systems (DBMS) market generally, Oracle is also one of the leading vendors in the data warehousing information access market segment."

IDC's report spans the three market segments of data warehousing tools -- management, information access and generation. Worldwide revenue for data warehousing tools reached $5.3 billion in 1999 -- a number that IDC predicts to be $17 billion by 2004. Of these three market segments, the data warehousing management tools and data warehousing information access tools recorded the highest growth rates of 22.4 percent and 38.6 percent from 1998 -- 1999, respectively. As the leading vendor in the data warehousing management tools market in 1999, Oracle leads the market with a margin of nearly ten percent over its nearest competitor. In the even faster growing area of data warehousing information access tools, Oracle ranked second as it closed the gap between the number one vendor with a market share nearly double that of the third-largest provider.

"In the evolving data warehousing and business intelligence marketplace, leadership is transitioning from the smaller niche vendors to companies such as Oracle which can provide a complete, end-to-end solution," said Jeremy Burton, senior vice president of Oracle9i Products and Services Marketing at Oracle Corp. "IDC's report validates Oracle's continued leadership within the data warehousing tools market, and we see that as an indication that e-businesses are looking to Oracle for business intelligence solutions far more often than our competitors to provide the tools and functionality that will help fuel their own growth and increase their competitiveness within the marketplace."

Addressing the full spectrum of e-business intelligence needs, Oracle's complete tool set is based on open interfaces that support a wide range of Oracle and third-party applications. Using Oracle Discoverer and Oracle Reports, enabled through the Oracle9i Application Server, business analysts can perform ad hoc queries and data analysis on relational and multi-dimensional data, and then publish reports on intranets or extranets. Oracle will soon add to its business intelligence capabilities with the Oracle9i Database, due to be release in the first half of 2001. Oracle9i Database will offer embedded OLAP and data mining capabilities to provide addition scalability and performance to business intelligence reporting and analysis. Together, Oracle's full complement of business intelligence tools reduce development and deployment costs and provide the comprehensive analysis critical to e-business success.

About Oracle

Oracle Corporation provides the software that powers the Internet. For more information about Oracle, please call 650-506-7000.

Contact Kristin Kryway of Oracle Corp, 650-506-6338, kristin.kryway@oracle.com