This IDC study provides an analysis of license sales for relational database management system (RDBMS) software during the period of 2002?2003 and a sales forecast by platform through 2008. It differs from earlier competitive analysis studies in that it provides license revenue explicitly and ranks vendors by license sales by platform. It also provides an analysis of the relationship between license and maintenance revenue growth.

"The market for RDBMS is rapidly becoming saturated, and the top vendors are now so large that measurable license revenue growth is getting harder and harder to come by," says Carl Olofson, program director for Information Management and Data Integration software research at IDC. "These vendors are finding some opportunity by taking advantage of the shift that appears to be underway from Unix to Linux as a server platform for databases and will find additional opportunity from the emerging commercial Web service vendors that are likely to emerge in a few years, as well as from the demand for integration of structured and unstructured data.

"The largest vendors may dominate the market overall, but there is significant opportunity for smaller players by focusing on various specialized or solutions-oriented routes or by selling through the embedded DBMS model," he adds.