IT organizations must contain costs, yet business demands must still be met. The mandate is to “do more with less.” Even if businesses are not growing, databases continue to expand, and costs for database software, storage systems and servers to support them continue to increase. At the same time, demand for information now extends beyond specialist communities to include mass populations of internal users, customers and business partners. Organizations must deal not only with data growth, but also with increasing database complexity, more frequent changes and updates, and the need to deliver new applications to increasingly diverse user groups.

Informational applications have become one of the most critical areas of IT activity. How will these challenges be met? This report examines an option -– use of IBM DB2 9.7 as an alternative to Oracle 11g -– that represents a major new opportunity for organizations to meet escalating demand while reducing IT costs. In three installation examples, use of DB2 9.7 results in combined three-year costs for databases, disk and tape storage systems, servers and personnel that average 36 percent less than those for use of Oracle 11g.