By Alan Radding
Enterprise database competency once was the bread and butter of consulting firms. Clients would spend tens of millions of dollars year after year to model all the information in the enterprise and collect it in a data warehouse. Then they would spend millions more building executive information systems and other applications to use that data. The database consultants who made all this possible were riding high.
Those days consulting companies maintained large, freestanding enterprise database practices packed with database experts. Not merely database administrators, these experts could partition the most unwieldy databases or tune the performance of giant databases to subsecond-response tasks that bordered on the proverbial rocket science. Others in the practice were data architects, people who understood how data was created and captured and how it flowed throughout the organization.
These dedicated database groups pretty much have vanished from the large consulting firms. The nearest thing to such a specialized enterprise database practice today is probably the data-warehousing group, but they don't call it that anymore. Instead, they call it business intelligence or knowledge management. For others, database expertise has been folded into other practices, such as enterprise application groups or enterprise application integration (EAI) specialties. "A lot of customers shifted focus from data and databases to EAI," notes Jeff Mitchell, managing director for solutions integration, KPMG Consulting, Inc., Dallas.
The enterprise database market itself has changed, consolidating around Oracle and IBM, which absorbed Informix. Microsoft, meanwhile, keeps trying to gain a foothold in the enterprise database segment with MS SQL Server, but headway is slow in coming. According to IDC, Oracle continued to dominate the market in 2000, a year that saw only 10% market growth.
"There are a lot fewer database players than before — mainly Oracle, IBM, and Teradata. Microsoft wants to move into the enterprise, but it is not there yet," observes Mike Schroeck, global leader, PwC's iAnalytics Practice.
The database market has evolved into a two-horse race, with Oracle commanding one-third of the market and IBM right behind with 31%. Each saw their positions increase in 2000 over 1999. By virtue of its installed base, IBM, with its DB2 database, dominates in the mainframe segment, but the main action is focused on Unix and even Windows platforms. It is only in the Windows arena that Microsoft, as expected, is a serious contender. But even here on its own turf, Microsoft doesn't blow away the competition. Rather, it barely edges out Oracle for the leading share of the market.
Meanwhile, Oracle continues to post big database wins. As reported by DM Review, Oracle is winning more of the big data warehouses, those 1 TB in size or larger, and the magazine reports a Survey.com study showing data warehouses to continue to expand in 2002, when the average data warehouse will top 1.2 TB. This growth is driven by data-intensive e-business applications, an increase in clickstream data, more customer touch points, and end-user needs, according to the researchers.
Oracle's big gun in the database showdown with IBM is the Oracle9i database. The Oracle9i database is attracting a following for enterprise applications including Web sites, transaction processing, multimedia, content management, and decision support, as well as data warehousing.
In a recent Oracle data warehouse win, Banco de Cr
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