Market Overview: Enterprise Data Modeling

Over the past five years, selecting a data modeling tool has meant choosing between three leading vendors: CA, Embarcadero Technologies, and Sybase. In a slowly growing market, these vendors have focused most of their efforts on taking share from one another and adding incremental features, for example, support for additional database management systems (DBMSes). But the market is about to enter a new phase: Three new challengers — IBM, Microsoft, and Quest Software — aim to both take share and grow the market, and each is pursuing a different entry strategy that builds on its own traditional strengths. But the existing market leaders aren't standing still; they're changing their tactics by focusing on adjacent markets such as development tools, database administrator (DBA) productivity, and enterprise architecture (EA) modeling. At the same time, the leading vendors are preparing for pricing pressure from the new challengers by reducing their own R&D and sales channel costs. Selecting the right tool for your data modeling needs ultimately comes down to understanding each vendor's evolutionary path and how it aligns with the future path of your development shop.