Intelligent Enterprise

IBM and Oracle tied last year for No. 1 in worldwide new license sales for relational database management systems, as the total market rose more than 10 percent to $7.8 billion, a market research firm said.

The difference in revenues between the two companies was less than $30 million, making it to close to statistically identify a leader, Gartner Inc. said.

IBM's revenue grew by 5.8 percent through strong sales of DB2 on the zSeries platform, and DB2 on the Unix platform, Gartner said. Oracle saw much of its nearly 15 percent growth from its databases running on the Linux platform.

Based on the small amount separating the two companies, IBM had 34.1 percent of the market and Oracle 33.7 percent, or $2.665.9 billion and $2.636 billion, respectively. Microsoft was third with 20 percent, or $1.6 billion. NCR Teradata and Sybase were fourth and fifth, respectively, 2.9 percent and 2.3 percent of the market.

RDBMS new license sales on the Windows server platform increased by 10 percent over 2003 to $3.1 billion, with Microsoft accounting for more than half of the revenue.

RDBMS revenues on the Unix platform declined by 0.7 percent, as Linux-based RDBMS sales increased by more than 118 percent. Revenues from new licenses on the open-source operating system, however, remained relatively small at $654.8 million.

Oracle accounted for 80.5 percent of new license sales on Linux.