Oracle/IBM battle beyond the database

Oracle expands middleware portfolio

By Jennifer Mears, IDG News Service, 08/22/05

Print
Email
Feedback
Resources
Discuss

Digg
Reddit
SlashDot
Stumble
del.icio.us
Technorati
dzone

Page 2 of 3

But while IBM continues to nip at Oracle's heels in the database market, Oracle is coming on strong in the middleware arena, where Big Blue has a comfortable lead.

"Yes, Oracle has had an application server for at least five years, but they were kind of the Rodney Dangerfield of the business for the longest time. They could get no respect," says Peter O'Kelly, senior analyst at Burton Group. "But then they made a hard decision. They started over with this Orion open source code base. They have been tenacious about sticking with it and making investments in it, and they optimized it for Oracle Database 10g. Now it is irrefutably a top contender in the Java space."

In the last year or so, Oracle has been chipping away at its "also-ran" image in the middleware market, analysts say. The latest figures from IDC show Oracle's application-deployment software business growing at twice the rate of the market average.

IBM, meanwhile, still holds a solid position at the head of the pack in the market, which IDC defines as including application, Web, and integration servers; message-oriented and transaction-server middleware; and all associated adapters, connectors, and gateways.

BEA Systems holds the No. 2 position, with a 12 percent market share compared with IBM's 37 percent and Oracle's 7 percent. But BEA doesn't offer the "suite" of platform features now available from IBM and Oracle.

"The market is changing so that it's not so much about an individual slice of the product stack at this point," O'Kelly says. "It's more about customers saying, 'We want you to be our end-to-end supplier, not just somebody who is solving one part of the problem for us.'"

That means customers are looking for databases, application servers, message-oriented middleware, and even applications and tools that integrate well, and if they come from one supplier, so much the better, O'Kelly says.

The user view

Online retailer Overstock.com, for example, has used Oracle databases and Oracle financials for years and has been happy to see the company expanding its offerings.

Overstock.com used to write all its code itself. But with a growing number of vendors offering Web-based applications, it's looking to take advantage of packaged products so that it can focus on more strategic IT development, says Shawn Schwegman, senior vice president of technology at the Salt Lake City firm.

"We're finding that Oracle and IBM and other big guys are coming out with a ton of software architecture designed for the Web," he says.

Schwegman says he does "bake-offs" to compare technology, but has consistently been happy with the performance from Oracle. Overstock.com uses Oracle's Fusion middleware—which includes Oracle's application server, business intelligence system, portal, and identity management—and is in the process of rolling out Oracle's customer self-service software, he says.

"IBM may have one up on Oracle on the WebSphere, Web e-commerce side of the house, but I don't think that's going to be too long-lived," Schwegman says. "Oracle owns the database side, and that's such a core component to everyone's Website. If you own the database and have the ability like Oracle does to then start rolling out these value-added applications, then you're going to have a new kind of competitor."

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.