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Link - www.varindia.com/2009/May/Buzz.asp (link resides outside of ibm.com)

While the DBMS terminology has become widespread in India, there is a vast space for the adoption of the systems. The market potential still has a significant amount of spread to increase market share. A computer database is a repository of structured data or information and a database management system is a collection of programmes that allows storage and retrieval of this data efficiently.

Database management systems have undergone significant changes over the last thirty years. Starting with IBM’s IMS, a hierarchical database management system, in the early 1970s to the recent grid computing relational database management system – Oracle, the database technology has undergone a substantial technological change. During the last decade, relational management system or a derivative of it has become a de facto standard of the industry. ANSI SQL has become the standard query language to interact with any DBMS, though each vendor has its own extension to the standard SQL.

Today, Microsoft’s SQL Server, Oracle, Informix, DB2, Sybase, Postgress and MySql are some widely used DBMS software. Although all of the above are database software, yet each differs from one another especially in set-up, performance tuning and troubleshooting.

In today’s world, data forms the most valuable source of information asset for an organisation. Businesses are highly dependent on IT for day-to-day operational and strategic decisions and churn out huge volumes of operational data every hour. That is when it becomes information. Information has become an asset and organisations need to maintain and manage their information to facilitate decision-making and comply with various regulatory requirements. “In order to manage and maintain the information, a robust, reliable serving infrastructure is essential, where databases play the critical role. In essence, database is the underlying foundation for applications in the data centre, be it core banking or ERP or CRM applications,” says Mr. T. Srinivasan, Vice-President, India Sales, Oracle India.

According to Gartner, in 2008, the Indian DBMS market was worth around $194 million and is expected to grow by 20% in 2009 over 2008. It expects the Indian DBMS market size to reach $233 million in 2009.

According to a Forrester Research report, the open-source database market stands at $850 million and is expected to grow by more than 40%, to $1.2 billion, by 2010. Though small in comparison with the $16 billion commercial database market, it is still a significant feat considering most open-source databases carry no licensing costs.

To achieve effective data management and improve operating performance, CIOs must adopt a solution that addresses the following three elements:

• Consolidation: Means matching, normalising, cleansing, and storing data imported from client systems.
• Harmonisation: Ensures that data is synchronised across heterogeneous system landscapes. Extending the scope of data consolidation, harmonisation also encompasses the distribution of consolidated, globally relevant information, and the enrichment of client application systems with locally relevant information.
• Central Master Data Management: Speaks to the maintenance and storage of master data and the development of distribution mechanisms for delivering master data to the systems that need it.

The ideal solution integrates seamlessly with an organisation’s existing infrastructure and their partners. Additionally, the solution is intelligent enough to ensure ongoing harmony of accurate and up-to-date information from disparate sources and is readily accessible to ensure it supports the needs of the entire business ecosystem.

Indian DBMS Market
The size, growth, and sheer desire to gain a competitive edge lured global DBMS vendors to India. They have opened offices, signed local partners, and translated their software – and they are finding success. Driven by the inherent need for businesses of all kinds to manage their information, Indian database management system (DBMS) software vendors support customers in a wide variety of markets. “From an Indian market perspective, there is still a long way for all vendors to go. The market potential still has a significant amount of spread to increase market-share,” says Anil Menon, Country Manager, Software Group Channels, IBM India/South Asia.

Oracle Corporation, IBM Corporation, and Microsoft are the leading DBMS vendors.

Oracle
Oracle is the market leader worldwide in the RDBMS space with 48.6% market share, according to Gartner report in 2007 which is based on software revenues.

According to Gartner, Oracle –

• has 48.6-per cent share (up from 47.9 per cent in 2006) growing at 14.9 per cent
• is growing faster than the market average of 13.3 per cent with US$8.29 billion in revenues
• continues to hold more market share than its two closest competitors combined.

Some of the advantages of Oracle’s latest version of database are that:

• The solution is available on all Operating systems like Windows, Linux and Unix.
• The technology is easy to install, configure and manage.
• The database is pre-configured for production usage, complete with automated space, storage and memory management, automatic backup and recovery and automatic optimiser statistics management.
• Oracle Database also supports all standard relational data types, as well as native storage of XML, Text, Documents, Images, Audio, Video and Location data.
• Oracle database uses the same proven concurrency techniques as Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, ensuring maximum throughput for all workloads. It has built-in Real Application Cluster as when the database is run on a cluster, a workload is automatically balanced across the available machines, ensuring maximum hardware utilisation. Clustering an environment with Real Application Clusters also protects business applications from system outages.

“Companies across several industry segments have chosen Oracle software over the last few years, Indian companies across manufacturing, retail, pharma, financial services, education, BPO/IT-enabled services and other industries have selected Oracle Database over other similar products available in the market to power their critical business applications. Telecom is one of the verticals, where we are currently focused on. 80% of banks and 90% of key telecom companies use Oracle technology,” says Mr T. Srinivasan.

IBM
Clients, especially in economic situations like the one we are facing today, look to companies like IBM who have stood the test of time and have continued to deliver client value. “We help clients across geographies come out stronger from a slowdown with our innovation and smart technologies that help protect IT investments and use New Intelligence to better our client’s value-propositions,” says Mr Anil Menon. 

Competitive advantage today requires more than superior productivity and cost efficiency. Smart organisations worldwide are beginning to get a sustainable competitive edge by unlocking the business value of their information.

“Only IBM has the end-to-end capabilities to help a company manage its data and content, pull together trusted information that cuts across diverse silos, and also gain valuable insights to optimise its business,” says Mr Anil Menon.

August 19, 2008 was a world-record-breaking day for DB2, when it became the first database to break the 1 million tpmC (transaction rate) barrier on an x86-64 processor. DB2 also produced a new price/performance record by becoming the first-ever sub-$2.00 $/tpmC result for any vendor posting over 1 millions tpmC on any server. With this new result, DB2 now holds the top three price/performance results for any TPC-C (Transaction Processing Performance Council) result over 1 million tpmC. These top three price/performance results were achieved on different servers, demonstrating the ability of DB2 to perform while saving money on any platform.

In June 2008, DB2 delivered a record-breaking TPC-C Benchmark result on IBM Power that surpassed Oracle Database's best result at that time on an HP Superdome by 49% using 1/2 the number of processor cores.

When DB2 outperforms another vendor's database product, it means that DB2 can typically run on less expensive CPU hardware and enjoy better performance. Of course, this not only saves the expenditure on hardware, it can also potentially reduce the amount spent on software licenses, software maintenance, and software support. 

DB2 publishes a broad spectrum of benchmark results to provide the information needed to make an informed decision. We are proud of the outstanding results we have achieved across virtually all the industry standard benchmarks. They cover a variety of hardware providers including IBM HP, Sun, and others running on IBM, Linux, Windows, Solaris, HP-UX, and additional operating systems. DB2 benchmarks consistently demonstrate:

• Strong support for transactional applications (e.g. TPC-C and other partner applications)
• Strong support for data warehouse and analytic applications (e.g. TPC-H and many partner applications)
• Strong support for both industry standard benchmarks (TPC) and application partner benchmarks
• Broad hardware platform support
• Broad operating system support, including Linux, UNIX, and multiple versions of Windows

Sybase has also announced that it would offer free licenses of its Eclipse-based database development tool, WorkSpace, with the upcoming release of Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) 15.0.3. This is good news for Sybase customers as they will be able to use WorkSpace Database Development for ASE and SQL Anywhere for free through 2009.

Go-to-Market Strategy
Global DBMS vendors started to venture into the Indian market with strong technology and capital advantage. As a result, they grabbed a considerable part of available market share by partnering with local service providers, distributors, and Value-Added Resellers (VARs).

In India, Oracle does business through its partners. More than 80% of the Oracle’s business is done through partners. There are more than 540 channel and alliance partners in India under the Oracle PartnerNetwork. Oracle PartnerNetwork is a global business network of more than 20,000 companies who deliver innovative software solutions based on Oracle software. “Through access to Oracle's premier products, education, technical services, marketing and sales support, the Oracle PartnerNetwork programme provides partners with the resources they need to be successful in today's global economy. Oracle has opened Partner Solution Center in our Gurgaon facility (one of four centres in the Asia-Pacific region),” says Mr. T. Srinivasan.

Some of Oracles’ partners in India include: Wipro, TCS, Infosys, Path Infotech, Sonata Software, Tech Pacific, Eastern Software, New Generation Consultants, Chain-sys India Pvt. Ltd., OSI Consulting, Filix Consulting, Accel Frontline, Systems Plus, Systime, KPIT Cummins, Conacent Consulting, and Bluestar Infotech.

IBM is marketing its entire e-business suite around its DB2 database. IBM offers competitively priced data warehouse solutions designed to help companies of all sizes analyse and use information to make better decisions.

“We are committed to delivering innovations that lower our client’s costs of managing data – right now that’s what is top of mind for across the industry. Our customers recognise the powerful innovations that DB2 delivers – such as data compression, XML, etc. and want to take advantage of them for new and existing applications, to lower the cost of managing their data. It is our goal to make it as easy as possible for them to adopt DB2, whether their applications were originally written for DB2 or not. It is important for us to help our customers/partners maintain their technology investments and ensure they can leverage their existing skills,” says Anil. 

IBM also promotes open-source strategies for the database solutions that we offer. This includes offering DB2 Express-C for production use at no charge – with IBM support options available. As businesses and applications expand, users generally look for a way to scale their databases. Unfortunately, many software vendors do not provide an easy migration path to do that. 

However, with DB2 Express-C they can get started for free with an easy-to-use database, that fully supports interfaces like Web Services, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Django, Python, etc as well as cloud environments like Amazon EC2 and any application written for DB2 Express-C can be seamlessly run against more scalable (Workgroup, Enterprise) editions of DB2 without any changes to the application code.

Finally...

In the global economy, competition is intense. Budgets are tight. Customers are demanding. To survive – and thrive – companies in all industries must streamline processes. But data is the power that runs a modern business. Regardless of the industry vertical, the importance of data and the need to manage it remains of utmost importance. That reflects the robust market for database management systems in India, with a strong growth potential even during a downturn. “Considering these factors, we definitely see a great market potential even for partners to invest and reap benefits out of Database Management System,” says Anil.