Who’s the DB leader? Oracle or IBM?

Like the variations in national college football polls, newly released worldwide database market share figures offer differing views on who is No. 1.

IDC on Friday reports that the market for relational and object-relational databases was $13.6 billion in 2003. Coming in first was Oracle, which had 39.8 percent market share with $5.4 billion, followed by IBM with 31.3 percent share, at $4.25 billion. Microsoft followed with 12.1 percent of revenues, at $1.65 billion.

Gartner last week, however, said database license revenues for 2003 were $7.1 billion. In Gartner’s assessment, IBM came out on top with 35.7 percent of the market, with $2.5 billion, followed by Oracle with 32.6 percent, with $2.3 billion.

But IDC’s numbers factor in both license and maintenance revenues, according to IDC Analyst Carl Olofson, program director for information management and data integration software. Oracle’s revenues grew by 8.6 percent last year while IBM’s grew at a 5.5 percent clip. Microsoft, with $1.65 billion, grew its revenues 14.7 percent, according to IDC.

IBM’s growth comes mainly from customers’ recommitment to the mainframe version of DB2 and continued strong growth of mainframe DB2 tools, according to IDC. Gartner, meanwhile, reported about $1.5 billion in sales for IBM on its mainframe and minicomputer systems and about $1 billion on other systems.

“I look at the entire database market and I’m not going to ignore a $1.5 billion portion of it just because it’s on the mainframe and the AS/400,” said Colleen Graham, principal analyst at Gartner.

Despite the disparity among the different research firms, an Oracle official claimed the top spot.

“If you talk to customers, Oracle remains the No. 1 provider for database software,” said Bob Shimp, vice president of technology marketing at Oracle. “IBM grew the slowest of all the top three vendors.”

IBM, in a prepared statement, said it was satisfied with its position. “IBM is pleased with its momentum in the marketplace, delivering to customers the broadest platform support in the industry. For the third year in a row, Gartner named IBM the overall market share leader based on new license revenue,” the company said.

Platform-wise, Linux growth is up, Olofson acknowledged. “What we’ve found consistently across the vendors we talked to, with the exception of Microsoft, which doesn’t sell Linux, of course, [is] they’ve reported that their Unix numbers are down and their Linux numbers are up,” said Olofson.