This article is more than 1 year old

Cloud swings Chinese database market behind local developers

Oracle rules on-prem, but Alibaba owns the cloud ... and here comes Huawei

IDC has had a look at China’s database market and found vendors within the Middle Kingdom are on the rise.

The analyst firm's tracking report on the state of China’s RDBMS market for the second half of 2019 found that Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, and IBM respectively fill the first four places on the nation’s database revenue charts, collectively scooping 66.8 percent of the market. In fifth place is Huawei with 6.8 percent share – a remarkable number as it only started selling databases in 2019.

In the cloud, Alibaba is king: the Chinese firm already has 48 percent market share and its local rival Tencent has 20 percent share. Oracle is in fourth spot and Microsoft in sixth, with seven and 2.5 percent of the market respectively.

IDC China senior analyst Wang Nan thinks local RDBMS vendors will continue to thrive, because more local buyers are working in the cloud, and even when they don’t, China’s database products are getting close to matching Western offerings.

“The main market demand of China's relational database is toward cloud service, distributed, and analytical type,” he said, adding: “The gap between domestic manufacturers' products and technologies in these areas is not large, and it is even at the same level as foreign manufacturers. In the future, both the macro environment and the development of database market demand will benefit local manufacturers.”

IDC’s cloudy numbers will delight Chinese policy-makers, given their desire for the nation to be less reliant on foreign technology. The likes of Oracle and Microsoft won’t be happy with the result, but as IDC says China’s total RDBMS market was US$1.34 billion for the half it’s not as if they’re missing out on massive opportunities. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like