The database market for embedded systems and devices is highly fragmented, according to Market research firm Venture Development Corp. (VDC). DBMS vendors lack recognition, brand awareness, and domain experience in the embedded systems market, in addition to resources to market directly to embedded systems developers, VDC says.

“Database management solutions at the device level are often application specific, requiring high performance, small footprint, high reliability, and zero administration,” notes Stephen Balacco, Embedded Software Analyst at VDC. “Unlike enterprise database developers, embedded developers do not have a market-dominating vendor that could be considered a standard.”

“The market consists primarily of a number of smaller companies whose products and focus extend beyond embedded systems to satisfying the needs of database management solutions that span from the enterprise to embedded devices,” Balacco said.

The following list shows VDC's assessment of the major worldwide suppliers of database management solutions for embedded systems and related services. The list is broken into three tiers, according to market share revenue; the companies listed within each tier are sorted by alphabetical order.

Tier One:

iAnywhere Solutions
IBM
Solid Information Technology

Tier Two:

Birdstep Technology
Empress Software
Oracle
Poet Software (FastObjects)
Sleepycat Software
TimesTen

Tier Three:

Enea Data (Polyhedra)
Faircom Corporation
FirstSQL
McObject LLC
MySQL
Pointbase (Pointbase Micro)
Others

“In order to satisfy their database management requirements, embedded developers are faced with a host of commercial solutions from a number of vendors advocating technical superiority and computing platform support,” added Balacco. “Rather than dedicate resources to conduct an extensive and costly evaluation of integrating commercially available solutions, embedded developers have been more inclined to develop their data management solutions in house.”

VDC said it expects demand for commercially available database management solutions for embedded systems is being driven by OEMs developing sophisticated embedded devices with increasingly complex data to manage. These devices will offer value to businesses by extending data capture and manipulation at the fringe with interaction and mining at the enterprise level. As database vendor relationships mature with OS vendors, we expect these products to become integral components of end-to-end solutions offered to OEMs as part of pre-integrated platform solutions. VDC believes that by using commercially available database management solutions, OEMs can . . .

• Reduce development and integration costs, and minimize risk;
  
• Reduce time-to-market; and
  
• Focus on product differentiation and innovation through the application.

Further information about the report is available here.

 
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