IBM Showcases Software Gains

With a key rival, Oracle, struggling through a brutal stock slump and a messy controversy involving a state government contract, Steve Mills, IBM's top software executive, showcased new technology, customer success stories and market share gains Wednesday. Later, Janet Perna, general manager of IBM's Data Management Solutions group that oversees DB2 development, outlined progress that her organization has made.

IBM, she noted, has reclaimed the lead in worldwide database market share, topping Oracle, Microsoft and all others. She took great pride in the fact that, according to Dataquest numbers, anyway, that IBM grew its Unix database market share by 20 percent between 1997 and 2001, while Oracle grew its share by just 1 percent. Furthermore, she noted, Oracle has lost 6.7 percent market share of the Windows market during this

period, while IBM's market share in the segment grew 13.6 percent.

"IBM grows faster than the rest of the industry on all platforms," Perna said.

She also highlighted gain made by IBM and its partners, which today account for 44 percent of IBM's data management software revenue, up from virtually nothing in 1995. Just four and a half years ago, IBM counted 2,100 partners among its fold. Now that number tops 16,000. Applications taken to market by these partners during this same period, meantime, have increased as well, to 26,000 from 4,700.

The company's progress in application servers, IBM said, is nearly as impressive. At the event, IBM again said it had overtaken BEA as the leading application server company and announced new WebSphere infrastructure software that helps customers reduce integration and deployment costs. The new WebSphere Application Server, MQ, Business Integration, Portal and enterprise modular software showcased commitment to IBM's open standards and satisfying exacting customer needs, IBM said.

Also at the event, IBM's Al Zollar, GM of the Lotus software group, provided a sneak peak at some product roadmaps, which revealed that virtually all Lotus products will get a facelift this year, capping off with the upcoming 6.0 release of Notes and Domino later this summer. Most of the product line will get another update in the latter part of 2003, IBM said. The next major update of the Notes and Domino products after version 6.0 isn't expected until 2004,

however.

Also at the event, which runs through Friday, IBM's Tivoli Software group unveiled a set of security, identity, access and privacy management resources to help customers create more secure e-business applications and manage them more effectively across different computing systems.