Linux database sales soar 158 per cent

Strong Linux sales helped the global relational database management system (RDBMS) market rebound strongly in 2003 with new licence revenue up just over five per cent on 2002.

Revenues totalled $7.1bn, a 5.1 per cent increase from 2002, according to analyst Gartner. New licence revenue for Linux RDBMS totalled $299.3m in 2003, a 158 per cent increase on 2002.

Oracle's Linux revenue grew 360.8 per cent in 2003 and accounted for 69.1 per cent of the market, while IBM's Linux RDBMS market share was calculated at 28.5 per cent in 2003, down from its 57.6 per cent market share in 2002.

Colleen Graham, principal analyst at Gartner, commented in a statement: "Many companies are examining ways to augment and improve reporting and data management capabilities to meet increasing regulatory compliance requirements.

"The increasing strategic importance of data warehouse and strategic business intelligence initiatives has provided some of the growth in the RDBMS market."

The analyst firm found that all of the top-tier RDBMS vendors were able to achieve an increase in new licence revenue in 2003.

IBM continued to account for 35.7 per cent of worldwide RDBMS new licence revenue, as its revenue increased 4.9 per cent on the back of DB2 sales on the iSeries and zSeries platforms.

RDBMS on the Windows server platform only showed a slight improvement in 2003, according to Gartner, with new licence revenue reaching $2.8bn, a 3.8 per cent increase from 2002. Microsoft extended its market share in this segment to 47.3 per cent, from 44.3 per cent in 2002.

One segment that suffered a decline in new licence revenue in 2003 was RDBMS on Unix (not including Linux). New licence revenue in this market decreased 5.9 per cent in 2003. Oracle accounted for 57.4 per cent of new licence revenue in this segment.