FROST & SULLIVAN STUDY SEES DB MKT SHIFTING FROM UNIX TO NT

The database market has seen better days; it is a long cry from the 1980's when all database vendors were enjoying substantial growth rates. However, a new study by Frost & Sullivan, the international marketing consulting company, believes that the database market is not confronted with the dawning of its demise, but set to experience a shift from UNIX to Windows NT.

Many of the main relational (hybrid) database vendors are showing rapid growth for their databases on the Windows NT operating system market. However, UNIX is not expected to be ousted out of the market. All database vendors recognize this and have or are expected to compete more aggressively in this market.

Frost & Sullivan's study adds that object/relational technology promises to be a highly powerful driver in the database market over the forecast period, pushing revenue levels from US$2.01 billion in 1997 to US$4.84 billion in the year 2004.

Continuing improvements within the object technology market are shaping the future for the database market with the introduction of object/relational databases and object-oriented databases. However, with their current status, object databases only account for a very small share of the total database market, but Frost & Sullivan expects this to change by the end of the forecast period.

New object technologies offer the possibility of far greater levels of scalability and performance. In an object database management system (ODBMS), information can be stored as objects and are then connected by the use of pointers. This is just one reason why object technology is being accepted quite rapidly in the finance/banking markets.

Anoop Ubhey, Research Analyst at Frost & Sullivan, reports: "Prices in the database market are in decline, but a whole raft of organizations in all vertical markets are demanding better service. Price is no longer their number one criteria. With the introduction of object technology, this trend is more dominant. However, we see that database vendors will more than make up for the dropping database prices through services offered."

"An increasing number of smaller retail companies will be able to financially justify Implementing large customer and transaction databases, thus impacting the database market positively."

In the mixed relational database market, representing the lion's share of overall database market revenues, Oracle and IBM dominate the picture where Informix and Sybase have fallen back drastically, whilst Microsoft is showing strong signs of growth.

"With the continuous pressure in the database market, many of the smaller database vendors Will be forced out or will be acquired by the larger vendors active in the market. As object technology becomes widely accepted, there are likely to be alliances between relational and object database vendors. However, some companies in the object-oriented database market are not faring too well and are looking for help in the relational database market," Ubhey comments.

Ubhey continues: "The broad scale movement to the Web is delighting vendors of object-oriented databases, who argue that building complex multi-media Web sites Is a job for objects. The subtext here is that object oriented (OO) vendors hope the Web and distributed computing will be the catalyst that brings OO into the mainstream. The mainstream is currently being heavily dominated by the relational database management system (RDBMS)."

Data mining and Data warehousing are two technologies that are expected to play a major role in the banking and retail markets. While retailers and financial institutions are fiercely competing to gain new customers, many of these organizations have realized that better customer management is required to move ahead. Through the use of data mining and data warehousing, organizations are looking to gain this competitive edge.

Competitive pressure in the NT database market is about to intensify as Microsoft prepares to launch SQL Server 7.0 towards the end of this year. SQL Server 7.0 addresses the support for very large databases. This is expected to change the market drastically. With the release of SQL Server 7.0, SQL Server becomes a legitimate competitor for enterprise business use.

Java is emerging as the big winner in the stampede to the Web. Java is object-oriented by nature and specifically designed to produce distributed applications. As a result, object-oriented database vendors are adopting Java at breakneck speed. An example is Objectivity, recently announced that a version of its Objectivity database, Objectivity/DB written in Java was shipped in June this year.

Frost & Sullivan is an international marketing consulting company that monitors a comprehensive spectrum of high-tech markets, including the IT hardware and software industries for market trends, market measurements and strategies.

For further information visit http://www.frost.com