ANALYSIS
10g's OS X Support: Harbinger for Mac Enterprise Growth?

"There is a demand for Oracle products on OS X. We saw this from developers when we preview-released Oracle 9i," Doug Kennedy, vice president for platform alliances at Oracle, told MacNewsWorld.

While Apple declined commenting directly about its partnership with Oracle, Tom Goguen, director of server software at Apple, did note the advances Apple increasingly is seeing in the general enterprise market.

"The fact that enterprise providers are bringing their solutions to OS X speaks volumes about our growth," Goguen said in an interview with MacNewsWorld. "Panther Server is the fourth release of OS X server in three years. It is now a mature platform."

The Database Marketplace

In a study released this year by Gartner (NYSE: IT) , IBM (NYSE: IBM) leads the overall relational-database market (RDBMS) with a 35 percent share, and saw most of its gains in the last year on its own PowerPC hardware platforms.

Oracle, meanwhile, is a close second with 33 percent; however, it leads in the Unix and Linux sectors, where it has traditionally ranked first.

Colleen Graham, principal analyst for Gartner Research and co-author of the RDBMS study, wrote that this market saw US$7.1 billion in new license sales in 2003. However, she cautions in the report that much of these gains were related to currency fluctuations.

"Gartner measures this market in terms of revenue rather than number of licenses sold or number of installations. When revenue from non-U.S. sales is converted to U.S. dollars, a portion of the growth is a product of the weak dollar and not attributable to increased demand," the Gartner authors wrote.

The study reflected gains on the Linux platform, with Oracle seeing growth in enterprise-related deployments.

"Few users are acquiring Oracle for the Linux platform without the [Real Application Cluster] option. We estimate that about 20 percent to 30 percent of Oracle RAC deployments are on the Linux platform," the Gartner authors continued.

DB2 to OS X?

The Gartner study did not specifically break down database platforms for OS X. Nevertheless, Oracle's decision to license 10g for Mac OS X conceivably might cause other vendors to follow suit.

Jeff Jones, director of DB2 information management strategy at IBM, said that, while the DB2 database platform does not currently support OS X, the company is sensitive to market demand.

"We're open to supporting any platform that represents a significant value to our customers, as we have demonstrated repeatedly," Jones told MacNewsWorld. "As of yet, we have not heard the customer requests that would justify building DB2 for the OS X platform."

However, Jones did point out that IBM will continue to monitor the situation and adjust quickly if a DB2 market for OS X starts to materialize.

Just Like Any Other Market

For his part, Kennedy said that Oracle is moving into the Mac OS space just like any other market it typically enters.

"This will go beyond our own traditional markets," Kennedy said. "We will be looking horizontally across the board" to expand the company's presence.

After the road show, Oracle plans to move promotions of 10g on OS X out to its regional offices where the company can get in front of customers, Kennedy confirmed, adding that he believes 10g's clustering technology and redundancy tools cater to Apple's traditional market successes in education and entertainment.

"This brings on-demand computing to OS X with grid management tools for our database platform," Kennedy said.

Meanwhile, Goguen acknowledged that Apple also is focusing beyond its traditional digital media and education markets to the general enterprise space.

"While our traditional markets have been with creative professionals and education, we see [implementations] of our enterprise applications across the board," Goguen said.

For his part, David Freund, practice leader for information architecture at Illuminata, said that Oracle's recent moves mean much more than just deploying the 10g database to support OS X.

"This is significant, in that Oracle is showing they will be shifting resources to continue development," Freund told MacNewsWorld. "They will need to perpetually support the product and more."