Database Market Shrunk in 2002

By Gillian Law, IDG News Service -- Worldwide revenue from new licenses of relational database management systems fell 6.9% last year, to $6.6 billion, Gartner said Wednesday. Oracle's RDBMS revenue for 2002 was $2.2 billion, down 20.5% from last year, and its market share slipped to 33.9%. It did, however, remain market leader in the RDBMS market on distributed systems, with 40% of the market compared to IBM's 24%, Gartner said. Despite flat revenue, IBM overtook Oracle as market leader with revenue of $2.4 billion. It now holds a 36.2% market share, Gartner said. Strong growth on IBM's DB2 for the zSeries compensated for a double-digit decline on DB2 for the iSeries, Gartner said. Microsoft showed the strongest growth in the overall RDBMS market, with an increase of 16.8% in its revenue to $1.2 billion. It now holds third place in the overall market with an 18% share, and is also number three in the distributed platform area, the research company said. Microsoft's growth has been helped by cost-conscious enterprise buyers, and improved scalability in its product, Gartner said.