Reliability Remains Critical

How can you stand out in a largely commoditized business like the database market? Compete on price? Yes. Technical reliability? Absolutely. Attention to partners? Definitely.

It's the second and third elements that seem to have put Oracle in a position to be one of the most-improved performers year-on-year in the 2005 VARBusiness Annual Report Card (ARC) Data Management Software category.

The database titan catapulted 15 points this year, with its partners giving it a total score of 65 compared with a measly 50 points last year. Much of the kudos emanate from partner confidence in the technical quality of Oracle's database and clustering products. After ranking dead last in product innovation last year, the company moved up to second, just one point behind Microsoft. Yet, the great irony is that Oracle's strong showing only moved it up from fourth place to third in this year's ARC ranking.

The big winner? Microsoft's SQL Server 7.0 and SQL Server 2000 moved from second place to edge out IBM's DB2 Universal Database. IBM ranked a point behind Microsoft's overall score. After Oracle, Sybase brings up the rear.

The win is certainly sweet music to Microsoft's ears. Microsoft's initial entry into the database market was viewed as a joke in the mid- to late- '90s, when nary an industry veteran bet that the king of PC software could take on the heavy-duty chores of enterprise-level database work. In fact, in the critical Product Innovation criteria, Microsoft scored highest; IBM, which has long fared well in technical reviews, faltered this year, ranking third in Product Quality/Reliability, Richness of Features/Functionality, and Compatibility & Ease of Integration.

And while Microsoft has not supplanted Oracle or IBM in terms of large corporate database installments, it has made great inroads into the midmarket customer set.

"My impression is that the sweet spot for Microsoft is different than that of Oracle and IBM, and, in turn, impacts the types of partners that Microsoft attracts and does well with," says Steve Graham, an IDC software analyst.

Graham gives all three of the big database players credit for re-energizing their partner programs and focusing on the indirect channel, especially as they court midmarket customers. Microsoft, Graham says, has really "put the pedal down" on its new system of partner-program competencies, in which solution providers choose to become certified in specific Microsoft skill sets.

Becoming part of a recognized specialty affects how partners feel about working with Microsoft, he says. The company ranked high in several Partnership areas, notably scoring best in Managing Channel Conflict and Ease of Doing Business. IBM, however, got a number of high scores in the Support criteria, including tops for Presales and Postsales Support, Quality of Technical Support and Marketing Support.

In November, Microsoft is getting set to unveil the long-awaited version of its database, SQL Server 2005 (formerly code-named Yukon). Delays in the database's several years of development did not deter partners from scoring the vendor high on its existing stable of data-management wares. SQL Server 2005 has tight integration with the company's new development toolset, Visual Studio 2005, sports native XML support and is part of Microsoft's long-term strategy to migrate customers to the next-generation of Windows (Vista and Longhorn).

As far as overachiever Oracle goes (the company has never ranked high among partners), product reliability and ingenuity in grid computing and clustering have kept partners happy this year.

"We have clients who have not rebooted their Oracle database in years," says Terry Ferguson, marketing manager at Information Design, a Denver-based provider of K-12 financial and HR systems whose foundation is Oracle's database and app server. "Scalability, reliability and price are all right."