Channel Best-Sellers: Software

Relational Databases

One thing you can say about the relational database market is that it's incredibly stable, as evidenced by how little change there has been in the sales-volume shares of the major players. The other definitive thing you can say is that Microsoft's SQL Server remains the leader.

Microsoft eked out a small gain of 0.7 percentage points in the last calendar year to add to its already considerable sales lead that now stands at 48.4 percent, according to data from the NPD Group/Distributor Track. The figures cover the U.S. dollar volume of database software sold through distributors. While Microsoft's share increase was small, it still represented the largest gain among the top five best-selling databases.

"It's the de facto database software for small and midsize companies," said Ronnie Parisella, CTO at Primary Support, a New York-based solution provider and Microsoft channel partner. The sales volume shares held by Oracle and IBM did not change at all from 12 months ago, holding steady at 24.5 percent and 22.9 percent, respectively. While Oracle and IBM sell more database software overall than Microsoft, many of those sales are direct while Microsoft's database sales efforts are more channel focused.

Earlier this year, however, Oracle unveiled its VAD Remarketer Program that makes it easier for solution providers to acquire Oracle database software through distributors for resale—a move intended to boost sales to SMBs.

Rounding out the top five, Filemaker's share of the total sales volume slipped 0.8 percentage points to 3.4 percent while Sybase picked up 0.1 percentage points to reach 0.3 percent sales volume share.

Microsoft's sales volume gains are smaller than in other six-month time periods—not surprising given that many customers are awaiting SQL Server 2008, the next generation of the product, that's due by the middle of next year. Oracle began shipping its Oracle Database 11g in July after the January through June 2007 period covered by these latest sales numbers. IBM, however, began shipping the Viper release of its DB2 database software in mid-2006.

-- Rick Whiting

Relational Databases 1st half 2007 Market Share Market Share Change 1st half '07 vs. 1st half '06 Microsoft 48.40% +0.7 Oracle 24.50% +0.0 IBM 22.90% +0.0 Filemaker, Inc. 3.40% -0.8 Sybase 0.30% +0.1 * Ranking based on 1st half 2007 share of sales dollar volume. Highlighted vendor gained greatest share from 1st half 2006 to 1st half 2007 Source: The NPD Group/Distribution Track (Incudes GTDC Data), www.npd.com/lps/distributortrack