More businesses are investing in database servers,
according to figures from research firm IDC. And the biggest area
of growth is among small and medium-sized
enterprises.
The analyst company found that spending on relational database
management systems grew by 11.6% to £8.27bn worldwide during
2004.
"There is no question that the overall trend is favourable -
companies are clearly spending again to meet their backlog of
database management requirements," said Carl Olofson, research
director at IDC.
There were no changes among the top five relational database
management systems suppliers from 2003 to 2004, with Oracle again
taking 41.3% of the worldwide market. Oracle was followed by IBM
(30.6%) and Microsoft (13.4%). Sybase and NCR Teradata were the
other two leading suppliers, each with 3.1%.
IDC predicted that during 2005 Oracle and IBM would be battling to
win new SME customers. However, Microsoft, which currently
dominates in this area, is set to strengthen its hand with the
release of SQL Server 2005.