IBM Touts Middleware Dominance

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Also, IBM recently rolled out a new advertising campaign that speaks to its self-stated performance edge in application server software and points to IBM’s leadership in database and data warehouse appliance capabilities as compared to Oracle.

The IBM adverts highlight:

• IBM sets SPECJ benchmark for WebSphere on Power Systems with 70-plus percent greater performance than Oracle
• The Netezza data warehousing appliance is up and running in 24 hours versus 24 days or more for Oracle Exadata
• DB2 has three times the performance per core as Oracle’s database in setting TPC-C and SAP 3D benchmarks.

Meanwhile, some market analysts said they have recently had to question Oracle claims in the middleware space.

Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, said: “It’s interesting in that Oracle appears to be attempting to deflate IBM’s numbers. In the last several market share reports from Gartner and IDC, IBM has been the clear global leader in middleware. And in part that’s due to the fact that the IBM mainframe has been such a dominant platform in the online transaction processing space and Oracle seems to want to downplay those numbers.”

Joe Clabby, president of Clabby Analytics, told eWEEK of Oracle’s middleware claims, “My issue is that I don’t know where they are getting their data from (they don’t source it).  And if they can’t identify where the data is coming from, that is tantamount to making up market share claims in my book.”

Oracle did not respond to a request for comment by the time this story posted.

IBM claims that it is consistent performance that attracts many clients around the globe to IBM such as QVC, CSN Stores, Deutsche Postbank UK, Korea’s National Health Insurance Corporation (NHIC), Portland General Electric, Italian banking group UniCredit and China’s Sichuan Seismic Bureau, among many others.

Strong customer advocacy

For example, QVC, one of the largest multimedia retailers in the world, has selected IBM Netezza to analyse user-generated content from its Web forums. In addition, CSN Stores, the third largest online retailer of home goods in the US, chose IBM Netezza to help its customers mine terabytes of data to monitor profitability and customer satisfaction trends.

Deutsche Postbank UK is using a new IBM Smart Analytics System to help improve the quality and accuracy of its business reporting for risk monitoring, portfolio and collateral analysis. Portland General Electric, Oregon’s largest utility, has realised $18 million (£11m) in annual operational savings using IBM’s WebSphere software to help speed business processes such as the replacement of 850,000 energy meters with smart meters and billing processes.

NHIC consolidated its integration information system with IBM’s Tivoli and WebSphere software, reducing the number of core processors needed to run their operations. Italian banking group UniCredit reduced back office response time from one day to minutes with an intelligent, paperless model using IBM’s virtualsation software.

And China’s Sichuan Seismic Bureau automatically captures data recorded by seismic monitoring stations, processing 100,000 messages accurately using WebSphere.