IBM DB2 gains momentum in SMB market

BANGALORE, INDIA: IBM today announced new IBM DB2 client agreements in India, reflecting the rapid DB2 business growth since the latest release of the product was launched in the market last year. This growth was led by strong demand for IBM DB2 9 as the preferred database platform for SAP implementations in the mid-market in 2008.

Many companies from various industry sectors such as manufacturing, industrial, automotive, chemicals and infrastructure are looking at deploying more sophisticated IT infrastructures. In fact, since IBM DB2 9 was launched last year, more than 100 enterprise customers worldwide have already chosen it over other database platforms to run their SAP applications - including SAP itself.  Increasingly, mid-market companies are realizing cost savings and performance benefits of SAP solutions on DB2 to manage internal operations including finance, project management, sales and purchasing.

Among those clients selecting IBM DB2 for SAP applications was Hindustan Motors, which recently upgraded to the latest version of SAP and migrated to IBM DB2. The company was able to lower the total cost of ownership with this migration and gained business benefits that many DB2/SAP customers have enjoyed.

 Vijaya Krishna K.S, manager, Information Systems, Hindustan Motors, said, “We have experienced multiple benefits from migrating to IBM DB2. User satisfaction has increased with almost 10 times improvement in the performance. IBM DB2 provides excellent reliability, security and scalability and has helped us reduce administrative and maintenance expenses."

“Indian enterprises are choosing IBM DB2 as their preferred database platform, for its SAP optimization which results in performance increases, cost savings and easier system administration,” said V Subramanyam, country manager, Information Management Software, IBM India/SA. “DB2 offers solutions to address unique customer requirements and its integrated support with SAP is the key enabling factor for the increased adoption of DB2 for SAP applications in India. In addition to new clients, many of the existing SAP customers are now also moving to DB2 to reduce the TCO for their current infrastructure."

“It’s a pleasure to collaborate with IBM to enhance the value provided to our customers,” said Mathew Thomas, vice president, Ecosystem, SAP Indian Subcontinent. “Our common goal is to provide our customers with innovative offerings that enable them to maximize business resources with top performance and efficiency.   For businesses seeking higher levels of scalability and availability at lower cost, the combination of DB2 and SAP offers a compelling alternative to database software from other vendors.”

IBM and SAP have been in a successful partnership in providing leading Information Management to the industry for many years. Numerous SAP customers worldwide running on the DB2 platform have benefited from this unique partnership which has resulted in the first database software truly optimized for use with SAP applications.

Certified benchmarks show that SAP runs significantly faster on DB2 than on alternative database platforms on comparable hardware. Through DB2 deep compression, clients have typically achieved reduced data storage of up 40 to 50 percent and improved throughput approaching 15 percent. Unique capabilities like the DB2 Database Partitioning Feature (DPF) and Multi Dimensional Clustering (MDC) offer customers a clear growth path, increasing scalability by enabling distribution of large SAP databases across several logical or physical partitions.

Customers benefit through faster data access, less data processing and improved query performance. Additionally, integration of DB2 database administration and performance monitoring tools with SAP solutions results in ease of use, reduced administration efforts and costs.  Clients also appreciate a common maintenance and upgrade strategy combined with one-stop service for DB2 and SAP installations.