Database Revenues on the Rise, So Sayeth the Tracker

July 25, 2011 Jenny Thomas

The database market is expected to perform well in 2011, according to a new report from IDC.

Current IDC projections for relational database management systems, or RDBMSes in the proper lingo for databases, added to data integration and access software that works in conjunction with databases, show that these combined categories will show 6.5 percent growth this year, hitting $33.9 billion. This follows a solid performance in the second half of 2010, when the market achieved year-over-year growth of 6.7 percent on revenues of $15.9 billion.

If you do the math on the data released by IDC, then the core relational database market will grow by 7.2 percent to just over $22 billion. IDC said in its statement that the data integration and access software market would grow at around the same rate as the overall market, reaching almost $4 billion in sales globally this. If you keep doing the math (as we had to do to calculate that relational database figure), that leaves around $7.8 billion in non-relational database sales for this year. These presumably include flat-file databases like IMS that run on IBM mainframes as well as myriad NoSQL key value store databases that are used by hyperscale Web companies and have been commercialized.

These projections are actually the findings of IDC’s Worldwide Semiannual Database and Data Integration Software Tracker, which provides total market size and vendor share for the following database and data integration market segments: relational database management systems, non-relational database management systems, data integration and access software, and database development and management tools. The Tracker measures total software revenue, including license, maintenance, SaaS, and other subscription revenue. It covers six geographic regions with country-level data for 13 nations.

“2010 was something of a bounce-back year for RDBMS, in the first half for large accounts and in the second half for smaller accounts. RDBMS remains on a strong growth trend, driven by technology diversification and increased adoption of hardware-software appliance-like configurations,” said Carl Olofson, research vice president, database management and data integration software. “Additionally, increased attention to data governance, the larger issue of enterprise information management, and the coordination of an increasing number of databases is helping drive growth in the data integration and access software market.”

The United States is forecast to perform strongly with 8.2 percent year-over-year growth in 2011 for database and related sales. Other countries are expected to have double-digit growth, including Australia, Korea, Brazil, India, and Russia. Following the trends around the globe, the database integration and access software market is expected to report more countries with double-digit growth relative to RDBMS. In fact, among the 13 large countries tracked, the only country not expected to grow well is Japan, which is forecast to achieve 2.6 percent annual growth during 2011.

The database and data integration market is dominated by four vendors: Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP. Together, these vendors captured more than 75 percent of the worldwide market in 2010.

Oracle held the top spot with the strongest year-over-year growth among the top four, as well as being the first and only vendor to surpass $10 billion in global revenues in a year. In the 13 largest country markets tracked, IDC estimated that Oracle achieved double-digit growth in most of them. Microsoft and SAP (which now owns Sybase) also did well in 2010, earning double-digit growth rates globally. Microsoft had its strongest country growth in Australia, Canada, India, Japan and Korea, while SAP had its strongest growth in Latin America, followed by Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) and Western Europe. Each of these three regions delivered double-digit growth for SAP. Outside the top four, there are another 14 vendors that earned more than $100 million each in the worldwide database and data integration market.