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In the new report, Market Share: Relational Database Management System Software by Operating System, Worldwide, 2007, Gartner, an independent analyst firm, announced that the RDBMS market grew 13 percent in 2007 to $17 billion. In 2007, Oracle grew 14.9 percent and maintained our lead in this market with 48.6 percent market share, while IBM and Microsoft remained in second and third place, respectively.

Of the three primary platforms, Gartner noted that:

• Has 48.6 percent share (up from 47.9 percent in 2006) growing at 14.9 percent
• Is growing faster than the market average of 13.3 percent with US$8.29 Billions in revenues
• Continues to hold more market share than its two closest competitors combined.

The full Wall Street Journal article is available here.

The event, hosted by Oracle President Charles Phillips and Oracle Senior Vice President Thomas Kurian, will provide insight into the BEA acquisition and announce the go-forward direction of Oracle Fusion Middleware. Core topics include:

• Welcome – BEA customers and partners
• BEA Integration – The role BEA products will play in the Oracle Fusion Middleware product family
• Strategy – Oracle Fusion Middleware evolution, strategy, and key products

Details are available here.

This webcast is one in a series of programs addressing the BEA acquisition and Oracle Fusion Middleware. Visit www.oracle.com/bea for more information on the BEA acquisition and www.oracle.com/middleware for more information on Oracle Fusion Middleware.

In its April 2008 report, Worldwide RDBMS 2007 Vendor Shares: Preliminary Results for the Top 5 Vendors (pdf), IDC, an independent analyst firm, has released its preliminary 2007 database market share numbers and, for the 15th consecutive year, Oracle is No. 1.

According to the report, “Oracle once again led the RDBMS market and increased its market share in 2007. Much of this growth is attributable to the sale of options for Oracle Database, especially Database Vault, Partitioning, Real Application Clusters (RAC), and Audit Vault. Oracle Database 11g has experienced unusually high early adoption rates for a major release, probably due to demand for some of its new features, especially Real Application Testing.”

The report also revealed:

• The RDBMS market is estimated to have grown by 12.1 percent from $16.6 billion in 2006 to $18.6 billion in 2007.
• With 44.1 percent, Oracle is the most widely adopted database in the industry.
• Oracle Database continues to outperform the average growth rate of the database market.
• Oracle database revenue was greater than DB2, SQL Server, and Sybase combined.
• The competitive gap widens with DB2 nearly 23 percent points behind Oracle.

To learn more and know why, read the Oracle Technology Network Tech Blog.

Oracle Corporation announced today that it had received approval of the European Commission and subsequently completed its acquisition of BEA Systems, Inc.

“The addition of BEA will accelerate innovation by bringing together two companies with a common vision of a modern service-oriented architecture (SOA) infrastructure,” said Oracle President Charles Phillips. “Together, Oracle and BEA will provide a series of complementary and well-engineered middleware products, allowing customers to more easily build, deploy, and manage applications in a secure environment.”

From April 13 to 17, celebrating the third year, the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), the Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) and Quest International Users Group (Quest) have combined resources and ideas to bring COLLABORATE 08 in Denver, Colorado.

During first general session keynote of the week, Oracle President Charles Phillips told Oracle customers, “Your role is growing in importance,” as Oracle continues to grow and rely on customer input. Before discussing what Oracle will be focusing on over the next three years, Charles reviewed Oracle’s accomplishments over the last year, and he made a key Applications Unlimited announcement. Charles also announced that Oracle is extending Premier Support for Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.10 until November 2010.

Missed the keynote? You can view the video here.

In spite of Oracle’s strong financial performance, some people still wonder if Oracle is successful with its acquisition strategy. Some people wonder if Oracle will maintain the acquired products, and if Oracle’s Application Unlimited strategy is real, or just a marketing message.

Independent research company Forrester Research shows unequivocally that Oracle’s acquired products are definitely alive and kicking! Forrester looked at the implementation capacity of the 12 largest system integrators worldwide, in particular their application-related capacity (in other words, excluding pure technology consulting).

The result? System Integrators have more than 72,000 trained consultants - many of them trained on the acquired products, and currently working on implementation projects for Oracle products. If the 12 largest System Integrators are willing to invest in these products, that’s a pretty good indication that customers are actively deploying them, upgrading them, and buying new licenses for these products.

Source: March 10, 2008 Forrester Wave: Oracle Implementation Providers, Q1 2008. Percentages show a composite number of work for SIs in the most recent 12 months, calculated from the number of consultants, the number of projects, and the revenues generated, based on the answers provided by the SIs. Fusion Middleware in this pie chart refers to Fusion Middleware in Oracle Application environments only.

So, in some words, Oracle Applications Unlimited program is based on the following drivers:

• Customer driven enhancements to product lines: Oracle continues to support and invest in all its Application product lines. Customer input is driving innovations and enhancements for all future releases.
• Ongoing upgrade innovations: Reduced down time, shorter upgrade cycles, and proven upgrade paths and methodologies, ensure that upgrades are now simpler and more efficient.
• Lifetime support and no forced migrations: Our Applications Unlimited program and lifetime support policy provide customers with a choice of what platforms and releases to be on and when to upgrade based on your company’s business needs, rather than forcing upgrades.
• Upgrade path to next-generation applications: Each of these new releases uptakes our Fusion technology. By staying current on these new releases, companies evolve closer to the next-generation applications, Fusion Applications.

For more information about Applications Unlimited, see here.

Few weeks ago, we introduced here the Secure Enterprise Search (SES) capability with Oracle E-Business Suite. Because Ovum/Summit recently published a note on Oracle’s Search product (Oracle Secure Enterprise Search is ahead of IBM and Microsoft along the dimensions of market position and breadth of functional scope), I think it’s a good opportunity to come back to the Oracle search solution. Oracle Secure Enterprise Search, a standalone product from Oracle, enables a secure, high quality, easy-to-use search across all enterprise information assets.

The Ovum/Summit report states that “Oracle is really the ‘dark horse’ in enterprise information access market. it is very functional, with significant out-of-the-box connectivity to non-Oracle applications”. In addition, the analyst notes as strengths that SES is already integrated with Siebel, Universal Content Management and Hyperion Essbase.

Oracle Technical information and Sample code are available here. A video demonstration is also available here. Finally, you can access the report from the Industry Analyst Reports site here.

Forrester segmented the IAM (Identity and Access Management) market based on several technologies, including directories, meta directories, virtual directories, provisioning, role management, password management, enterprise single sign-on (E-SSO), Web single sign-on (Web SSO), and federation, along with emerging areas, including entitlement management and identity auditing.

In its March 18, 2008, report, The Forrester Wave: Identity And Access Management, Q1 2008, independent analyst firm Forrester, “evaluated leading identity and access management (IAM) vendors across 117 criteria and found that Oracle has established itself as the IAM market Leader due to its solid technology base across the IAM landscape and its compelling, aggressive strategy around what it refers to as application-centric identity.”. Forrester believes that Oracle has excellent enterprise role management and risk-based authentication capabilities, noting, “we already see Oracle reaching into the small enterprise space more successfully than similar-size competitors.“Serving as the security backbone for Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Identity Management helps customers and partners decrease security threats across diverse IT environments while helping address governance, risk, and compliance needs. Oracle Identity Management was the fastest growing suite of Identity Management products in 2006, based on total software revenues worldwide. Oracle Identity Management’s support of industry standards such as WS*, XACML, SAML, and SPML helps enable customers and partners to more easily integrate applications with the framework.

The family of best-in-class software includes Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Access Manager, Oracle Adaptive Access Manager, Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On Suite, Oracle Identity Federation, Oracle Virtual Directory, Oracle Internet Directory, Oracle Management Pack for Identity Management, and Oracle Web Services Manager — all of which can be used in its entirety or as individual components. Details are available here.