News

SQL Server: Look How It's Grown

• By Scott Bekker
• 06/21/2001

Paul Flessner, senior vice president for .NET Enterprise Servers, made the announcement this week at Microsoft's TechEd 2001 show for developers here.

For perspective, that's about a quarter of Microsoft's overall enterprise server revenues, which amounted to $4 billion over the same period.

Barry Goffe, the group product manager for the .NET Enterprise Servers, says Windows servers -- the category consisting of Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 server operating systems -- added up to a little less than $2 billion of that revenue. That leaves the remaining $1 billion of enterprise software revenues coming from a host of products, including the ubiquitous Exchange Server.

SQL Server's momentum originated with its last two releases. One was the release of SQL Server 7.0 in 1998, which represented Microsoft's first real overhaul of the database code since buying the product from Sybase. The second was Microsoft's launch of SQL Server 2000 last summer.

Microsoft recently earned notice from GartnerGroup's Dataquest research unit as the top selling database by revenue on the Windows NT platform in the year 2000. It was the first time Microsoft has surpassed Oracle on Microsoft's own operating system.

Flessner was in charge of SQL Server before being promoted to his current position. He says SQL Server sales totaled about $65 million when he took over the product in 1994.