The worldwide database and data integration software market revenues are forecast to reach $33.9bn in 2011, growing at 6.5% year over year, according to International Data Corporation (IDC).

The market achieved year-over-year growth of 6.7% on revenues of $15.9bn in the second half of 2010, the Worldwide Semiannual Database and Data Integration Software Tracker indicated.

According to IDC research vice president of Database Management and Data Integration Software Carl Olofson, the strong growth in 2010 was driven by technology diversification and increased adoption of hardware-software appliance-like configurations.

"Additionally, increased attention to data governance, the larger issue of enterprise information management, and the coordination of an increasing number of databases is helping drive growth in the data integration and access software market," Olofson said.

The relational database management systems (RDBMS) market is expected to perform well in 2011 with above average year-over-year growth of 7.2% and an increase of $1.6bn in worldwide revenues, despite being relatively mature market, IDC said.

IDC Worldwide Software Trackers associate vice president Wilvin Chee said the data integration and access software market is also predicted to grow at similar rate, reaching almost $4bn globally.

The US is forecast to show strong growth with 8.2% year-over-year growth in 2011, while other mature markets such as Australia, Canada, and Korea are expected to grow above the market average.

Double-digit growth will be seen in countries like Australia, Korea, Brazil, India, and Russia.

Japan, the only country out the 13 tracked is not expected to grow well with forecast of 2.6% annual growth during 2011.

Four vendors – Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP – have dominated database and data integration market, together accounting for more than 75% of the worldwide market in 2010.

Oracle, which achieved double-digit growth in most of the 13 largest country markets tracked, has reported strongest year-over-year growth among the top 4 and surpassed $10bn in global revenues in a year.

Microsoft had its strongest country growth in Australia, Canada, India, Japan and Korea, while SAP had its strongest growth in Latin America, followed by Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) and Western Europe.

SAP was able to achieve double-digit growth in each of these three regions.

There are 14 other vendors apart from the top 4 that earned more than $100m each in the worldwide database and data integration market.