Event
Summary
Following on the heels of SAP AG and Siebel Systems, i2 Technologies,
Inc., a leading Supply Chain Management vendor, and PeopleSoft, a leading
Enterprise Resource Planning and Payroll/Human Resources vendor, have
also chosen IBM's DB2 Universal Database as their preferred database for
developing current and future applications, and as their preferred backend
database for customer deployment. According to the vendors, PeopleSoft
will use DB2 Universal Database as its primary Unix development platform
for PeopleSoft 8, which is their latest Internet-based architecture. PeopleSoft
7.5 applications are now available on DB2 UDB for Sun Solaris, Microsoft
Windows NT 4.0, IBM AIX, and IBM OS/390.
In
addition, IBM has standardized on and is deploying Siebel eBusiness Applications
across its entire customer-facing infrastructure, uniting sales, service,
marketing, and call center professionals, including third-party business
partners and their Web sites, serving more than 55,000 internal IBM users,
30,000 business partners, and millions of customers directly over the
Web.
IFS
AB, a leading ERP vendor which was previously Oracle-centric, has announced
an agreement with IBM to add DB2 support. According to their announcement
"IBM will collaborate with IFS to define, build, and execute joint marketing
activities which will generate sales of IFS Applications licenses. Additionally,
IBM will provide the required hardware, database licenses, and expert
level consultancy resources to add DB2 support to IFS applications."
Market
Impact
Oracle's focus on competing in the areas of enterprise resource planning,
customer relationship management, supply chain management, financials,
and many others, is hurting their database sales. Their database sales
growth pales in comparison to the growth in their applications areas,
and these vendor defections are a strong indicator as to why. (For more
information about the SAP/Siebel defections, see Oracle
Gets SAP'ed by IBM and "Oracle
Loses Again".)
Oracle
will continue to see strong growth in their overall product line, but
TEC predicts (60% probability) that database server sales will continue
to decrease as a percentage of overall revenue. On the other hand, IBM
seems committed to DB2 Universal Database and its continued development
and marketing, and does not compete in the applications areas as Oracle
does. We believe that the product will continue to improve, and DB2 UDB
Version 7.1 shows strong promise.
User
Recommendations
Oracle 8i is an extremely strong database, but has recently been crushed
by IBM's DB2 Universal Database in the latest TPC-C benchmark tests that
IBM ran in conjunction with Microsoft and Intel. IBM's latest benchmark
numbers approximately triple the best performance displayed by Oracle.
(See "IBM's
DB2 Tops TPC Benchmark List") Oracle and IBM should both be included
on a short list of vendors for large transactional-based databases and
data warehouses, but the price/performance ratios should be carefully
considered by customers, and used as leverage for reductions in the price
of the software.