"The IT sector is going nowhere" - Sybase boss

Sybase CEO John Chen has warned fellow vendors not to expect end-user interest in products and services to lead to the level of sales experienced in the late 1990s.

"The IT sector is not going anywhere," Chen said in an interview with our sister site, News.com. "There seems to be a lot of proof of concept stuff going on, lots of excitement about the new products but nobody is writing the cheques. So one could be really fooled by the level of pipeline activity going on."

Predictions of two to three per cent growth in IT spend next year are on the optimistic side, according to the Sybase boss. His company made a loss of $25.m last year on the back of sales of $926.1m.

Despite pessimism about the market Chen is bullish about his company's future even though Sybase are a lowly fourth in the key database market behind IBM, Oracle and Microsoft.

"We are very strong with our installed base of 45,000 customers. They will buy more databases from us," Chen said. "The database market is still incredibly healthy - last quarter we won 26 new customers in Asia alone."

According to figures from Gartner Dataquest Sybase held 2.6 per cent of the overall database market in 2001, based on revenues. IBM headed the list with 34.6 per cent, Oracle was second with 32 per cent and Microsoft third with 16.3 per cent.

Asked about a recent tie-up with Peoplesoft, Chen sidestepped talk of a merger with the software company but added: "[Another] acquisition is not out of the question. Of course I probably wouldn't be buying Oracle, IBM or Microsoft any day soon but acquiring new database technology whether it is in security area or the clustering area or some really neat idea is not out of the question."

Chen joined Sybase in 1997 from Siemens Nixdorf. He became CEO in October 1998.