Database market now worth £8bn

The worldwide relational database management systems (RDBMS) market totalled £8bn in 2006, a 14.2% increase on 2005, said analyst Gartner.

The overall RDBMS market continued to be dominated by the top-tier suppliers, as the top three suppliers - Oracle, IBM and Microsoft - accounted for 85.6% of worldwide RDBMS revenues.

Oracle and Microsoft experienced growth rates above the industry average at 14.9% and 28% respectively. IBM trailed in terms of growth with an 8.8% revenue increase in 2006.

“As data-intensive initiatives continue to grow, the relational database management system is receiving ongoing attention,” said Colleen Graham, an analyst at Gartner. 

“Organisations are looking to gain insight into the business to make better decisions and identify new opportunities. This is forcing them to invest in their data assets, purchasing new technology and tools that increase operational efficiency, and enable better use of data management resources,” said Graham.

While Linux as an RDBMS operating system was still well behind Unix and Windows with a 15.5% market share, it continued to dominate in terms of OS growth, with a 67% rise over 2005.

The top-five database providers by revenue in order are Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Teradata and Sybase.

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