It's Chen vs Ellison: Sybase chief takes a pot shot at Oracle

In an exclusive interview with silicon.com, he also joined fellow competitor IBM in criticising Oracle's new pricing policy, which he claimed was encouraging confused customers to opt for Sybase databases over Oracle.

Korean insurance company Samsung was just one example of a customer which declined to renew its contract with Oracle, opting instead for a Sybase system, Chen claimed.

He said: "Oracle have a complex pricing policy and at the end of the day they're running that policy to get more money. Companies like Samsung are sending a signal to Oracle that they're not the only company to play ball with."

But Oracle defended its pricing policy, claiming that Sybase was simply regurgitating criticism hurled at them by IBM in the past week.

Tim Payne, director of 9i marketing EMEA at Oracle, said: "It's silly to say we've taken our eye off the database market, we've been market leader as long as I remember. Because we're market leaders everyone likes to take a shot."

He said that while Sybase was busy blowing its own trumpet, Oracle did not see it as a serious competitor in the market and that many of Sybase's traditional customers were beginning to feel the same way.

He said: "Sybase's customers are getting nervous about the future. A lot of their financial customers want to migrate to Oracle because funding that was once spent on R&D is no longer available. Their licensing fees just don't allow it."

Eric Woods, research director of knowledge management at Ovum, said that while Sybase had the potential to catch up with Oracle, Chen's words were currently wishful thinking.

"The problems that Sybase and Informix have had have allowed Oracle to consolidate its strengths in the database market. It shouldn't be under estimated how much leeway Oracle have in that space," he said.

But Chen bullishly vowed to take the database market by storm. On his first trip to the UK in over two years, he claimed that Sybase's database market share had grown 16 per cent last year as Oracle foolishly took its eye off the market.