With revenue from sales on Unix down 4% last quarter it’s no wonder Oracle Corp is banging on about its success in the Windows NT market, where it believes it overtook Microsoft Corp as the leading database supplier on NT last year. But why now? Is it because of the hammering its stock took last week? Dataquest’s figures for 1996 show Oracle’s market share rising from 37.1% of a $172.1m market in 1995 to 39.3% (or $178.4m) of a $454.1m market in 1996. Microsoft’s share, Dataquest says, declined from 50.4% ($86.8m) to 37.2% ($169.1m in 1996). But Dataquest published those numbers back in September – and don’t they seem awfully little given all the hype around SQL Server? Only a couple of weeks ago Oracle President and Chief Operating Officer Ray Lane was telling Morgan Stanley & Co analyst Chuck Phillips the company believed it had a 37% share of the database market on the Windows NT platform – down a couple of points on 1996 – compared to 32% for Microsoft SQLServer, suggesting other vendors are gaining share at both Microsoft and Oracle’s expense. Indeed Lane said the competitive environment is less intensive than it was last year because while Microsoft’s successful marketing managed to stall Oracle transactions last year, once more information became available about the capabilities of SQLServer it became less of a factor in the mid- and high-end of the market. For the record, Dataquest’s 1996 figures show Sybase’s NT database revenue declined from 7.1% ($12.2m) in 1995 to 6.7% ($30.4m) last year. IBM’s 0.6% ($1m) share rose to 4.8% ($22m) last year. Computer Associates’ share rose from 1.7% ($3m) to 4.2% ($19m) last year; while Informix NT sales rose from 1% ($1.7m) to 3.9% ($17.7m). Meantime, with Oracle’s crucial application revenue up just 7% year-on-year the company is expected to hire a senior executive for each of its major verticals and product lines over time, including its Applications for Oracle group.
