RDBMS: Oracle and the Rest
For years the Indian RDBMS market has been the story of Oracle and the others, and the scenario did not change much during 2006-07. With a 64% market share, few would argue against the Oracle hegemony; in fact, for years it has been the question of who would head in this "others" category. By 2006-07, that answer too was pretty obvious with Microsoft SQL Server firmly ensconced at #2 in the RDBMS pecking order with 19% market share.

Oracles reign at the top was bolstered by the apparently broad acceptance of the 10gR2 release, both amongst large enterprises as well as SMBs. Therefore, it could boast of RDBMS wins ranging from Genpact, Centurion Bank of Punjab, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, Gujarat Ambuja Cements, and Department of Income Tax to mid-sized organizations like Sonic Biochem, Auto Clutches and Noble Grains among others.

Microsofts elevation to #2 in the RDBMS space was heralded by the significant dents it made in the Indian database market with SQL Server 2005, growing at a rate of 25% in the enterprise and at 50% in the mid-market segment. Overall, this allowed SQL Server revenues to jump by 30% over the previous year without including revenues coming from the MS Access product line.

RDBMS have matured by 2006-07 to be more than just pure database offerings to data platforms. The likes of Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and Sybase offered a wide range of services in this area. Apart from these paid services, free ones were also available on Open source platforms. From a transaction point of view, the most important considerations for enterprises choosing a particular RDBMS were performance and reliability. Another key differentiator was the ability of the RDBMS vendor to provide data services within the database platform, so as to be able to disseminate information within different applications without requiring additional consulting efforts.

SOA attained great relevance from the RDBMS perspective during 2006-07. As more companies moved to adopt SOA, delivering consistent information to business processes emerged as a new challenge. Some organizations found that inconsistent views of data and even inconsistencies in how data is derived can put their SOA projects in peril. In order to keep SOAs up and running, databases needed to avoid any such inconsistencies.

Oracle JDeveloper, a component of Oracle Fusion Middleware, was a complete platform for SOA that was optimized to run with Oracle Application Server and Oracle Database. Built on open standards and platforms, JDeveloper supported all major J2EE application servers and databases.

BI: Intelligent Business
The BI market in 2006-07 was driven by the maturity of todays applications, be it core banking or ERP. These applications had created silos of data and decision makers were not able to get a unified view of their businesses. Lack of standardizationbe it amongst customers, suppliers, materialsresulted in poor quality data where multiple ways were used to record supplier or customer names or material details. Standardization was imperative for reporting, budgeting and forecasting and this directly led to a flourishing BI segment.

Indian enterprises viewed BI software as a strategic tool and the market witnessed investments ranging from pure reporting and analytics tools, to business performance management tools, balance scorecard, KPI tools, and so on. They adopted BI and analytics solutions in an effort to overcome the challenges of competition and globalization, and pave the way for increased revenue growth and profitability.

Unlike most other business applications, where it was either a one-horse or two-horse race, at least four players competed evenly on the BI front. The scales finally tipped in the favor of SAS, though the gap between Business Objects, Oracle and Microsoft (others in Top Four) was not too much. Various compliance regulations from the Reserve Bank of India on risk management in banks increased the relevance for BI during the year.

According to market analyst Datamonitors new report "Decision Matrix: Selecting a Business Intelligence Vendor," although the market leaders SAS and Oracle were well placed to maintain their positions, vendors like Business Objects and Microsoft could also seriously challenge the current leaders.

Middleware: On Middle Ground
The toughest thing about analyzing or estimating middleware market is agreeing on what exactly is middleware, with various vendors defining the way it suits them. Of course, there are the traditional middleware: application servers and portals about which there is a consensus. The messaging oriented middleware is also part of the portfolio now, and increasingly identity management is entering that area. From the products point of view, that means all BEA products; IBMs Tivoli, Lotus, Websphere l (but not Rational and DB2, which IBM defines as middleware); and those components from Oracles Fusion Middleware series. In our classification, we have excluded BI, which is taken in business applications; and the enterprise content management tools that often integrates with portals. But the big news in middleware is the advent of SOA. SOA, which brings in a large service elementthough we think some of that will get productized soonhas suddenly made middleware a familiar phrase for the enterprise IT managers.

Looking at the market in the way defined above, the whole middleware segment in India was fairly small at Rs 260 crore, with Oracle, IBM, BEA ruling the market (see chart). This includes only the investment made by Indian users or service providers to provide service in India and does not include some deals with global service providers from India with the product vendors for offering as part of their services to customers in other countries.

Surprisingly, in India, a comparatively nascent IT market, has seen a lot of interest (not yet translated to business in many cases) for SOA. That is partly because of the hype about the concept but also because some of the new generation companies want to build a scaleable, flexible architecture from day one, though the RoIs in SOA may not be as attractive for them as older firms grappling with integration issues.

Rajneesh De
rajneeshd@cybermedia.co.in

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