Gartner: IBM, Oracle databases down, SQL Server up
ENT News | at | by Mike
New research on the database market from Gartner on Wednesday quantifies in yet another area the case for arguing that 2002 was the worst year yet for IT. But the research also supports another trend -- no matter how bad things got, Microsoft kept growing and churning out profits.
IBM's revenue dropped by nearly 1 percent to $2.4 billion, still good for the overall market share lead at 36.2 percent. Oracle had a horrible year, with a 20 percent drop in revenues to less than $2.2 billion. That saw the onetime database king fall to second place in revenues to IBM with 33.9 percent share.
Microsoft, on the other hand, enjoyed growing revenue and market share. The company's SQL Server database had revenue growth of nearly 17 percent to almost $1.2 billion from $1 billion in 2001. Microsoft's market share rose from 14.3 percent of the overall market in 2001 to 18 percent in 2002.