Oracle Lays Claim to Being No. 2 Software Maker Over IBM

Oracle Lays Claim to Being No. 2 Software Maker Over IBM
Published: Oct 18, 2013
Updated: Feb 2, 2021
1 minute read
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Oracle, citing public IT industry earnings reports, on Oct. 17 declared itself to be the second-largest software company in the world behind Microsoft.

“Given IBM’s recently announced quarterly results, we would like to take this opportunity to point out that Oracle’s software business has been growing faster than IBM’s software business, and now Oracle has moved up to become the number 2 software company in the world while IBM has slipped to number 3,” Oracle said in an email advisory to the media.

“Over IBM’s last four quarters, they reported software revenue totaling $25.7 billion, while during Oracle’s last four quarters, we reported software revenue totaling $27.8 billion,” Oracle said.

Microsoft earned $61 billion in the fiscal year ending June 30 for its various enterprise and consumer software products.

The Forbes Global 2000, an annual ranking of the top 2000 public companies in the world by Forbes magazine, is based on a mix of four metrics: sales, profit, assets and market value. The top 10 companies on the 2013 list for Forbes’ Software & Programming industry listing are ranked here:

1. Microsoft, United States

2. Oracle, United States

3. IBM, United States

4. SAP, Germany

5. Symantec, United States

6. VMware, United States

7. CA Technologies, United States

8. Adobe Systems, United States

9. Fiserv, United States

10. Amadeus IT Group, Spain

Chris Preimesberger

Chris J. Preimesberger is Editor Emeritus of eWEEK. In his 16 years and more than 5,000 articles at eWEEK, he distinguished himself in reporting and analysis of the business use of new-gen IT in a variety of sectors, including cloud computing, data center systems, storage, edge systems, security and others. In February 2017 and September 2018, Chris was named among the 250 most influential business journalists in the world (https://richtopia.com/inspirational-people/top-250-business-journalists/) by Richtopia, a UK research firm that used analytics to compile the ranking. He has won several national and regional awards for his work, including a 2011 Folio Award for a profile (https://www.eweek.com/cloud/marc-benioff-trend-seer-and-business-socialist/) of Salesforce founder/CEO Marc Benioff--the only time he has entered the competition. Previously, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. He has been a stringer for the Associated Press since 1983 and resides in Silicon Valley.

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