Oracle Faces EnterpriseDB Surge

January 18, 2012

Oracle has ruled the information processing market for years now with fear as the dominating marketing tool. The article, EnterpriseDB Is Giving Oracle a Run For Its Money, on Forbes, explains how that has changed (with Oracle stock prices serving as proof) thanks to a declining economy and EnterpriseDB.

For years now Oracle has been on fire doing the once believed impossible – making money on open source technology. Controlling over fifty percent of the information processing market with their MYSQL Oracle thought they were scot-free. They were until the economy tanked and some smooth talking competition stepped in.

With IT departments’ budgets drastically cut across all industries some creative outside-the-box thinking has been going on. Oracle has kept their customers in line by telling scary stories of what will happen if they switch to another provider. With EnterpriseDB offering the same services as Oracle but at only ten percent of the price, most IT departments are willing to take their chances.

The article speaks of EnterpriseDB’s growth by reporting,

One of the reasons that it’s grown so fast is that EnterpriseDB has lowered customer switching costs. How so? Along with its support of the open source database, PostgreSQL, EnterpriseDB has added features that let customers port the applications they’ve developed for Oracle and other databases over to PostgreSQL.

Oracle might have overcome the open-source hurdle a while back and come out ahead, but we wonder about how they will fare with new competition like EnterpriseDB. Obviously, we are not alone as their stock shares have taken a dramatic hit.

Catherine Lamsfuss, January 18, 2012

Comments

One Response to “Oracle Faces EnterpriseDB Surge”

Julio on January 19th, 2012 1:29 pm

You say: “For years now Oracle has been on fire doing the once believed impossible – making money on open source technology.”, and your example of this is MySQL, a technology that was acquired in 2009 as part of the purchase of Sun.

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