Microsoft Delivers Knockout Punch To IBM and Oracle

The heavyweights' hyperbolic marketing, competitive pricing and emphasis on working with partners have made it difficult for competitors to survive: Informix jumped into IBM's arms earlier this year, and Sybase's long-term future is now unclear.

In this year's VARBusiness Annual Report Card (ARC), Microsoft delivered the knock-out punch with an overall score of 77--taking back the top spot from IBM, last year's winner--and scoring first place in nine of the 11 criteria.

"With SQL Server 2000, Microsoft offers customers a high-performance, easy-to-manage database management system that can be the foundation for complex data-warehousing applications," says Ken Winell, CEO at Econium, a Totowa, N.Y.-based solution provider.

SQL Server 2000 includes support for symmetrical multiprocessing, which lets the software scale up and support large workloads. "We wanted to make it easier for companies to add capacity to Web applications; now they can simply add more processors," says Steve Murchie, group product manager of Microsoft SQL Server.

SQL Server 2000 was a major reason Microsoft's worldwide database management revenue grew by 45 percent in 2000. As a result, the company overtook Oracle as the top Windows NT database-management supplier with a 38 percent market share, compared with Oracle's 37.3 percent, according to Stamford, Conn.-based research firm Gartner Dataquest.

The uptick could continue for a few reasons. For one, the company's products are becoming more powerful. Microsoft plans to deliver a 64-bit version of SQL Server 2000 that runs on the Intel Itanium processor by the end of the year. Also, the company is shifting its emphasis from desktop to server software, a move some say will boost database-management system sales. Earlier this year, the company restructured its sales and field-service program, so 30 percent to 40 percent of Microsoft sales representatives' cash compensation is based on server sales rather than client-access licenses or desktop software.

Microsoft president and COO Rick Belluzzo says the company has designs on penetrating the enterprise and small-business markets. "Both are very important objectives for us, and we are investing for the long term in both with our .NET servers and Windows products for the enterprise, and with products like MSN and Xbox on the consumer side," he says. "Across both categories, we also are working to create a new platform based on XML Web Services, which we think represents the next significant generation of technological advancement."