This IDC study examines preliminary 2004 revenue data for the worldwide relational database management systems (RDBMS) software market and presents a view as to how the top 5 vendors and the market overall fared that year. In addition to revenue figures and analysis for the top 5 vendors and the market overall, a breakdown by geographic region is also included.
"The year 2004 was a good year for the RDBMS market, but there may be somewhat less here than meets the eye," says Carl Olofson, IDC's research director for Information Management and Data Integration Software research. "During 2004, the U.S. dollar took another hit on currency exchanges, especially in relation to the euro and some Asian currencies. Even taking these factors into account, we can say that Microsoft, NCR Teradata, and Oracle experienced fairly strong growth in RDBMS revenue during 2004, for varying reasons."