Suppliers of Unix relational databases can look forward to some good times in the next six years according to London-based market researcher Ovum Ltd, which predicts the European Unix relational sector will quadruple to $4,300m by 2000, in an overall database management system market set to double to $8,700m. Oracle Corp is still outstripping its rivals, but is being followed closely in the Unix market by Sybase Inc, with Informix Corp not far behind. Meanwhile, IBM Corp is going to have to work a lot harder in the Unix market with DB2/6000 to avoid being marginalised. It has the largest database revenues of any company today, but its main source of database income, mainframes and AS/400s, will have dwindled to only 20% of the market by the end of the century, reckons Ovum.
