IDC Gives 2006 Report Cards for Data Warehousing Vendors

Published: September 4, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IDC is handing out its annual report cards for the vendors of software in the data warehousing space. Because it takes a long time to gather and sift through the market data, IDC is only just now assessing who did what in the data warehousing generation and management tools market for 2006. The worldwide market was healthy in 2006, rising by 12.5 percent to reach $5.7 billion in aggregate sales.

As has been the case for the past decade, the large database makers are big in data warehouse tools. Oracle barely outgrew the overall market, posting $1.9 billion in data warehouse tool sales, up 13.1 percent compared to 2005's showing by Oracle, according to IDC. IBM is once again the number two player in the data warehouse tools market, with $1.25 billion in sales in 2006, up 12 percent, more or less with the market. Microsoft continued to outgrow the market in 2006, but its growth relative to the market has slowed. In 2006, Microsoft had $775 million in data warehousing tools sales, up 23 percent over 2005's sales. Upcoming editions of SQL Server, due in February 2008, will allow Microsoft to put a lot of pricing pressure on Oracle and IBM, which could hurt their prospects for growth in 2008. But at this rate, it will be the fall of 2009 before IDC tells us what happened. The SAS Institute, with $499 million in tools sales, and NCR's Teradata unit, with $419 million in sales, rounded out the top five in the data warehousing tools market, and both grew more slowly than the market as a whole. (Teradata is set to be spun out of NCR by the end of September, incidentally.) Other vendors in this space comprised $896 million in sales, up 9.4 percent.

IDC breaks the data warehousing tools market down into two pieces--tools to generate data warehouses and tools to manage them. Spending on generation tools came to $1.3 billion in 2006, up 12.7 percent, while management tools accounted for $4.4 billion in spending, up 12.4 percent. SAS, Informatica, and IBM are vying for control of the data warehousing generation tools segment, according to IDC's analysis, as they have been doing for years. Oracle has 41 percent of the data warehouse management software tools market, followed by IBM's 23 percent share, and Microsoft's 15 percent share.

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