The database (RDBMS) segment has been one of the hottest segments in recent years, with majors like Big Blue, Oracle and Microsoft fighting over the spoils. While Oracle is expected to continue its lead, the others are hot on its heels and FY 2002-03 could bring even more exciting times in this segment, say Rajneesh De and Srikanth R P

Database software: Top Trends

• Acceptance of centralised databases to increase as network connectivity improves.
• Oracle will continue being leader in FY 2002-03
• Increased emphasis on security
• Vendors offering end-to-end enterprise application solutions around their databases based on one common architecture
• Increased adoption by smaller companies on lower-end platforms
• Total cost of ownership to come down

The RDBMS battle raged throughout 2001 and continues to rage on in all its ferocious intensity. Oracle, the long-time market leader in India finds itself facing stiff competition from Microsoft and IBM and is expectedly reacting swiftly through its counterattacks. Like India’s election ‘unbiased’ opinion polls during elections , each of which throws up a winner who’s clearly the favourite of the publication of political party commissioning the poll, even India’s RDBMS market results depend on whom you ask what, and how you phrase your questions.

The Indian RDBMS market is currently sized at Rs 360 crore is likely to touch Rs 412.8 crore by the end of this year. Oracle should continue to lead the market, albeit by a wafer-thin margin over Microsoft SQL Server, while DB2 from IBM plays a formidable challenger, and Sybase brings up the rear. In the Windows space, SQL Server will continue to lead in 2002, although with more and more enterprise networks likely to embrace Linux or different Unix flavours this year, this fact would lose much of its significance.

Tech trends

In FY 2002-03 the market will see more smaller footprint databases because of the proliferation of devices. Robust replication support would be necessary due to the offline capabilities needed in these devices. There will be enhancements in clustering since it allows businesses to harness multiple servers to run a very large database, allowing servers to share work or take over from each other if one fails. Another trend will be partitioning which can provide tremendous benefits to a wide variety of applications by improving manageability, performance, and availability.

It would not be unusual for partitioning to improve the performance of certain queries or maintenance operations by an order of magnitude. Moreover, partitioning would greatly simplify common administration tasks. Partitioning would also enable database designers and administrators to tackle some of the toughest problems posed by cutting-edge applications. Plus it would be a important tool for building multi-terabyte systems with extremely high availability requirements.

The main growth opportunities this year are likely to be in distributed databases, enterprise content management and information integration. Other trends would be the adoption of Linux technologies and availability of key ISV solutions. Linux will continue to be a growth engine and customers are expecting the availability of middleware software like database systems on various Linux versions. Finally, with data growing at unprecedented rates, information integration and the availability of ‘hooks’ or connectors within the database to other enterprise applications will be a key need to provide seamless information access for enterprises in 2002.

While e-business and integration middleware would continue to be the biggest growth segments even this year, database and data management technologies would still see healthy growth rates. This growth in the database space would be driven by four main customer demands, according to Frank Luksic, country executive, Software and Developer Relations, IBM India. He says these are strong technology, strong partnering, low cost of ownership as well as service, support and relationships.

All RDBMS vendors would need to maintain a reliable, scalable, highly available and usable technology that is going to be viable for the future needs of businesses. Strong technology would be vital in 2002 for work on information integration a vital component in building information infrastructure around the Internet. With databases becoming a central component in an enterprise application, most RDBMS vendors are likely to tie up with more and more application vendors and system integrators. This would enable them to provide infrastructure for application vendors. With 2002 following the most economically depressing year in recent memory, ease of installation, maintenance and usage of the RDBMS would become even more vital, since this ensures low cost of ownership. Technical support and services would be key to making installation and deployment of products easy for customers. Services such as data warehousing, replication and clustering would now be an integrated offering available from any RDBMS vendor.

In fact, the most important trend in 2002 would be that of all vendors offering end-to-end enterprise application solutions around their databases, based on one common architecture. The fragmentation of data and the lack of automation of the entire process are the bane of most users. But the adoption of a solution based on a single architecture around the database would ensure smoother functioning for these users. More and more vendors are likely to position their e-business suites around the database as a single repository and then start collapsing their data models.

2002 will also be the year when newer versions of existing RDBMS software will be released. The latest offerings from the IBM and Microsoft stables would be involved in developing an information infrastructure for managing, analysing and integrating all forms of information. In this regard, most vendors are working to enhance XML, which is the underpinning for information integration. The newer versions are likely to offer users load balancing by allowing databases to each support its own hard drive, thereby reducing the network bottleneck that occurs in trying to access information. However, according to Chris Hummel, vice president, marketing, Oracle, there has been a perceptible paradigm shift amongst vendors on not concentrating solely on releasing the next version identified by numbers.

Business strategies

In 2002, most database vendors will try to build and leverage partnerships with software solution vendors and application vendors. There would be a concerted effort to increase the skills base through tie-ups with premier education centres and universities. Many would play significant roles in e-governance initiatives together with the central and state governments, besides communicating expertise in Linux. They would also like to be seen as the database of choice for any ERP implementation as well as build the database foundation while moving customers into business intelligence and content management. Some vendors will focus extensively on offering disaster management solutions as well as security aspects built around the database. The major verticals for RDBMS vendors in India include financial services (banking and securities), hospitality, retail, ERP (for large and small and medium organisations), telecom and the government sector.

What threatens Oracle and the other RDBMS vendors in 2002 is the tried and successful Microsoft strategy of bundling its products or offering extras at a price that is much lower than what traditional players have been charging. A case in point is the desktop applications and browser market. Microsoft might be trying to repeat this strategy with .NET in 2002. Bundling works for Microsoft, especially where large deals are involved or in the government sector where they can afford to undercut heavily. What Oracle, or for that matter any other database-only vendor lacks is the ability to offer a wide range of products that can be integrated on a single platform like Microsoft and IBM can. Maybe its end-to-end enterprise application solution will solve this purpose. With IBM, this advantage extends to hardware as well.