Strategy & Intelligence

Intuition IT Solutions LTD.

Transcript

1. 1/10/2015 Project Plan Strategy & Intelligence Enrique De Montreuil INTUITION IT SOLUTIONS LTD.
2. 1 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence Table Contents Prologue ............................................................................................................ 2 Introduction ....................................................................................................... 3 The Market (ODBMS) ......................................................................................... 4 Detailed Product Analysis ............................................................................... 8 Strategy ........................................................................................................... 27 Versatility...................................................................................................... 27 Target companies ......................................................................................... 28 Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 30
3. 2 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence Prologue The purpose of this plan is to explain the structure and process that will be pursued in order to break through to some of the most promising emerging technology markets and the firms which form part of it. An attempt to explain the steps that will be taken to achieve the latter will be divided in sections. Description of technologies will be done briefly and as clear as possible. By ‘sections’ it is meant that certain aspects will be analysed first such as the current market for mentioned and selected technologies.
4. 3 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence Introduction The world of data management is changing: Big Data, Analytical data platforms, Scalable Cloud platforms, NoSQL data stores, NewSQL databases, Object databases, Object-relational bindings, Service platforms, and new approaches to concurrency control1 are all hot topics both in industry and academia. These systems are referred to as ‘Operational Database Management Systems’ (ODBMS).2 The operational database management system market is defined by relational and non-relational database management products that are suitable for a broad range of enterprise-level transactional applications. These include purchased business applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management and customized transactional systems built by an organization's development team. In addition, we include DBMS products that also support interaction data and observation data as new transaction types. These products are also used both for purchased business applications, such as ERP, catalogue management and security event management, and for customized systems.34 Further, there is no requirement that the DBMS be a closed-source product; commercially supported open-source DBMS products are included in this market. The operational DBMS market continues to grow, with innovative products and features being delivered by both new and traditional vendors. 1 ‘Fundamentals of Relational Database Management Systems’ By S. Sumathi, S. Esakkirajan (Springer Science & Business Media, 13 Feb 2007) 2 Not to be confused with Object DBMS, or Object-orientated DBMS (OODBMS) 3 ‘The Database Report’ THE DATA ADMINISTRATION NEWSLETTER Published: January 1, 2014 http://www.tdan.com/view-articles/17214 4 Beynon-Davies P. (2004). Database Systems 3rd Edition. Palgrave, Basingstoke, UK
5. 4 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence The Market (ODBMS) The world of ODBMS is a tough one because there is simply ‘no best product’. Selecting a database is a bit like picking a religion. There are pros and cons to each, and the discussions run hot and heavy. The worth of the global relational database market at about $28bn – and it's growing at 7.6 per cent a year. Some of the biggest and most profitable names on the computing scene – Oracle, IBM and Microsoft – are currently working on relational database management systems.5 In an increasingly digital world, businesses are creating more and more data. This data can be used to provide insights into how a business is being run and what can be done to improve it. Harnessing and understanding the data that is produced can give businesses a competitive edge and can provide a depth of market knowledge that may not have been previously possible. Even then, it can still be difficult to navigate the ocean of possible solutions. Fortunately, there is a great deal of analysis of database providers and their products. Rank Last Month DBMS Database Model Score Changes 1. 1. Oracle Relational DBMS 1439.16 -20.63 2. 2. MySQL Relational DBMS 1277.51 +8.93 3. 3. Microsoft SQL Server Relational DBMS 1198.61 -1.44 4. 4. PostgreSQL Relational DBMS 254.49 +0.48 5. 5. MongoDB Document store 250.90 +4.38 6. 6. DB2 Relational DBMS 200.13 -10.12 5‘12 simple rules: How Ted Codd transformed the humble database - Near misses and lucky escapes for a multi-billion-dollar baby’ By Gavin Clarke (Posted in Applications, 19th August 2013 08:32 GMT)
6. 5 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence 7. 7. Microsoft Access Relational DBMS 139.14 -0.76 8. 9. Cassandra Wide column store 98.75 +4.69 9. 8. SQLite Relational DBMS 96.20 +1.49 10. 10. Redis Key-value store 94.24 +6.36 11. 11. Sybase ASE Relational DBMS 83.78 -2.21 12. 12. Solr Search engine 76.74 -1.68 13. 13. Teradata Relational DBMS 67.05 -0.35 14. 15. HBase Wide column store 53.59 +2.51 15. 14. FileMaker Relational DBMS 51.69 -0.53 16. 16. Elasticsearch Search engine 49.04 +3.14 17. 17. Hive Relational DBMS 35.39 -0.98 18. 18. Informix Relational DBMS 34.81 -0.31 19. 19. Memcached Key-value store 34.37 +0.68 20. 20. Splunk Search engine 33.07 +1.60 21. 21. SAP HANA Relational DBMS 29.90 +2.096 6 http://db-engines.com/en/ranking (only showing up to rank 21 as of 09/01/2015)
7. 6 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence Huawei is not even listed here as their product is yet to be conceived. Not only Huawei is preparing for a launch of a product to rival the big players, now start-ups are becoming serious challengers too (Snowflake, Databricks). The market is divided into two:  Open-source  Closed-source Free/open-source software – the source availability model used by free and open-source software (FOSS) – and closed source are two approaches to the distribution of software.7 Let’s talk about open source for a minute: MySQL is growing at an unprecedented rate. As of March 2014, the open source database giant occupied a whopping 56% of the database market share, seizing an overwhelming majority of database users in nearly every region across the globe. While other open source databases, such as MariaDB, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB have been on the rise, it appears as though the next generation operational database market will continue to be spearheaded by MySQL for the immediate years to come. 7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_open_source_and_closed_source
8. 7 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence 8 Given the current state of world events, it’s a curiosity that MySQL has the largest market share in Russia, whereas MongoDB is the leading open source database in Ukraine. Research groups, such as 451 Research, have shared their recent market forecast of the next two years for the open source database market, suggesting a substantial growth, not just in MySQL usage, but in the market as a whole. As of March 2014, MySQL enjoyed a staggering 16 million installations, causing the entire operational database to grow by almost 50% per year as its annual growth rate. The revenue in the open source market in 2012 was $500 million, and the revenue in 2016, which is led by MySQL (and includes NoSQL and NewSQL), is forecasted to be close to $3 billion.9 8 ‘The State of the Open Source Database Market: MySQL Leads the Way’, 28 Aug 2014 by Paul Campaniello 9 ibid
9. 8 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence Detailed Product Analysis 10Summary from ‘Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems’: Actian Headquartered in Redwood City, California, U.S., Actian offers relational DBMS (RDBMS; Ingres) and embedded (PSQL) engines, both suitable for operational use. Following a recent repositioning, Actian focuses primarily on analytical use cases. Strengths  Large customer base: Actian claimed to have over 210,000 customers at mid-2013. Broad geographic and industry coverage for Ingres, and a loyal following for PSQL, remain in place in 2014.  Rich portfolio: Actian's offerings provide modern features, including multiversion concurrency control (MVCC), object and geospatial support, and column-level encryption.  Embeddable offering: Actian's PSQL gives it a means of entering the small-footprint, minimal-administration market that is so important to mobile and Internet of Things applications. Cautions  Complex portfolio, focused elsewhere: Actian's recent positioning efforts are aimed at analytics, not operational use cases.  Deployment challenges: Actian received the lowest scores from customers surveyed in 2013 for ease of use, and very low scores for ease of implementation. Our interactions with users of Gartner's client inquiry service in 2014 paint the same picture.  Market focus: Gartner's interactions with clients continue to indicate a lack of momentum from Actian in relation to its operational DBMS and support of its Ingres DBMS. 10 Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems (16 October 2014) ID:G00261660 Analyst(s): Donald Feinberg, Merv Adrian, Nick Heudecker
10. 9 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence Aerospike Headquartered in Mountain View, California, U.S., and founded in 2009, Aerospike markets a hybrid in-memory/flash NoSQL DBMS — a real-time data platform — for the operational transaction market. It is available both as an open-source community version and an Enterprise Edition. Strengths  Operational DBMS functionality: Aerospike's offering makes hybrid use of DRAM and flash as addressable memory and not as file system support. Synchronous copies and support for multiple data centers add high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) capabilities. Aerospike's hybrid DBMS structure supports JSON and NoSQL key- value data.  Marketing and hardware ecosystem: Aerospike has strong partnerships with hardware component vendors for DRAM and flash memory. Its marketing focuses on the market segment that requires high transaction rates with near-100% availability.  Performance: Aerospike's reference customers supported its claims of high performance by awarding it the highest scores for performance of any vendor in this Magic Quadrant. They also gave it the highest score for ease of doing business. Cautions  Lack of full functionality: Aerospike is strong in HA functionality but lacking in some basic SQL and NoSQL functions, although it has added some SQL functionality.  Competitive positioning: With an increasing number of vendors supporting in- memory DBMSs, Aerospike will need to differentiate itself more clearly. Many vendors have much larger marketing programs — a disadvantage for Aerospike.  HA/DR and ease of programming: Aerospike's reference customers identified difficulties in programming and the management of HA/DR as weaknesses of its product, probably due to the complexities of DR. Altibase Headquartered in Seoul, South Korea and Palo Alto, California, U.S., Altibase offers Altibase HDB, an SQL operational DBMS capable of using in-memory, traditional disk or hybrid storage. Altibase XDB is an in-memory-only DBMS. Strengths  Performance and support: Reference customers gave Altibase high marks for the overall performance of its operational DBMS, and for its support, professional services and ease of use.
11. 10 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence  Broad use case applicability: In addition to applying its technology to unique billing scenarios in the telecommunications sector and real-time flaw detection in manufacturing scenarios, customers use Altibase HDB for analytics and storage of textual and rich-media content.  Product maturity: Over 85% of Altibase's reference customers reported no problems with its product. Cautions  Limited global penetration: Although successful in Asian markets, Altibase has yet to establish much brand awareness or penetration elsewhere. The company has recently established several partnerships with global organizations.  Shortage of large reference customers: Reference customers themselves stated that Altibase's limited number of globally recognized reference customers made adoption more difficult.  Narrow product focus: Altibase does not support alternative consistency models or support multimodel capabilities, such as documents and graphs. Basho Technologies Newly headquartered in Seattle, Washington, U.S., Basho Technologies offers Riak, a distributed, masterless key-value store. It is available as a free, open-source, Apache- licensed download, as an Enterprise Edition, and as Riak CS, a multitenant cloud object store. Basho offers an Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) API and a cloud service. Strengths  Resilience: Riak provides multi-data-center distribution and replication with automated balancing; it does not fail upon server failure or network partition.  Rich features: Riak offers secondary indexes, MapReduce, support for JSON, tunable consistency, multiple programming languages, Apache Solr support and pluggable storage engines.  Growing paid customer base: Basho's customers include one-third of the Fortune 500 companies in North America and EMEA. It also has a strong community, which contributes to the product. Cautions  Single architecture focus: Riak's key-value-only architecture limits its broader adoption and therefore restricts Basho to the Niche Players quadrant in the operational DBMS market.  Growing competition: Major vendors will continue to add key-value functionality (such as Microsoft Azure Tables and Oracle NoSQL, both already available), which will create additional competition for key-value use cases.
12. 11 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence  Recent changes to management team and reorganization of company: These suggest that prospective customers should conduct a careful assessment before making major commitments to Basho, even though its funding is strong and likely to grow. Cloudera Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, U.S., Cloudera offers Cloudera Enterprise, a commercial version of Apache Hadoop for which Apache HBase provides the operational DBMS capabilities. Cloudera Enterprise is available on-premises, as an appliance and through various cloud providers. Strengths  Support for emerging use cases: 80% of Cloudera's reference customers use Cloudera Enterprise for storing and processing machine-generated data, such as clickstreams and sensor data. Using this observational data in transactions is now possible with HBase.  Scalability: Cloudera's reference customers repeatedly mentioned Cloudera Enterprise's ability to scale to accommodate massive data volumes.  Stability and ecosystem: Cloudera has raised over $1.2 billion in venture funding and has developed a large partner ecosystem that encompasses every relevant segment of the enterprise software market. Cautions  Challenging implementation and use: Reference customers scored Cloudera lowest of all the vendors in this Magic Quadrant for ease of implementation. It also scored poorly for ease of operation and programming, and support and documentation.  Lack of differentiation: Cloudera's operational DBMS, Apache HBase, is also offered by its competitors.  Focus: The operational DBMS is only one component of Cloudera Enterprise. It may have to compete for development and support resources with the rest of the product suite. Clustrix Headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S., Clustrix offers a low-administration, shared-nothing, distributed RDBMS, ClustrixDB, with automatic sharding and replication. It is available as on-premises software and in the cloud. Clustrix also provides a managed database as a service.
13. 12 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence Strengths  Performance: Clustrix provides extreme scale-out clustering for performance and availability. Parallel SQL query execution across a cluster supports hybrid transaction/analytical processing (HTAP) use cases.  Simplicity: The Clustrix database is designed to be largely self-managed, to reduce operational complexity and total cost of ownership (TCO). Integration is simplified by the implementation of the MySQL wire protocol.  E-commerce focus: Clustrix recently announced a new focus on applying its scale-out DBMS to e-commerce applications that face scaling challenges. Cautions  Lack of multimodel capabilities: ClustrixDB offers no support for data types beyond traditional relational ones. More than half its reference customers have deployed another operational DBMS to support nonrelational use cases.  Value challenges: Clustrix received low scores from its reference customers for overall value for money. However, all reference customers were using the Clustrix appliance, not a software-only product.  Poor early performance: Half the Magic Quadrant survey respondents who did not select ClustrixDB stated that this was because its product performed poorly during a proof of concept (POC) exercise. Couchbase Headquartered in Mountain View, California, U.S., Couchbase offers an open-source, distributed multimodel (document and key value) NoSQL DBMS, Couchbase Server. It is offered in Community, Enterprise and Lite Editions for on-premises, mobile or cloud deployment. Strengths  Rich feature set: Couchbase's March 2014 release, Couchbase Server 2.5.1, offers in- memory object caching, automatic partitioning, limited ACID transaction support, "eventual persistence" (optional nonblocking writes to a caching layer), cross-data- center replication, a synchronized, lightweight, embedded JSON DBMS, and MapReduce support. Couchbase also has a strong technology road map.  Large customer base and revenue growth: Gartner estimates that Couchbase has over 450 customers in several industries. It also claims to have achieved 400% revenue growth in the past year as its deal sizes have increased.  Financial and partner strength: Couchbase added a $60 million "E" venture funding round in June 2014, which is helping to fund growth in its international presence. Couchbase has established relationships with several hardware partners and leading system integrators.
14. 13 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence Cautions  Quality: The number of responses from Couchbase's reference customers that reported bugs or unreliable software was significantly above the average for this Magic Quadrant.  Missing functionality: Of the surveyed Couchbase customers, 48% reported some absent or weak functionality. Some of these functions are on the road map, but not implemented yet.  Competition: Growing pressure from megavendors and MongoDB, especially in document-oriented use cases, is likely as interest in these use cases grows. DataStax Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, U.S., DataStax provides DataStax Enterprise, a commercial version of the open-source Apache Cassandra database. The product is downloadable for on-premises operation, as well as through multiple cloud providers. Strengths  Customer satisfaction: Reference customers scored DataStax above average for most metrics, and awarded very high scores for overall DBMS performance and their experience of doing business with this vendor.  Expanding functionality: DataStax has added in-memory transactions, search capabilities, and support for analytics through Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop. Reference customers identified administration and development tools as positives.  Vibrant community: DataStax has helped develop a robust open-source community around Apache Cassandra through developer and enterprise conferences. Cautions  Weak brand traction: Inquiries from Gartner clients mention DataStax only one-third as often as the open-source project Apache Cassandra. The market has yet to consistently associate DataStax with Apache Cassandra.  Challenging starts: 53% of the respondents who evaluated DataStax did not select it due to poor performance during POC testing. This may indicate a poor fit between the characteristics of DataStax Enterprise and the piloted use cases.  Quality between versions: Reference customers identified regression bugs when upgrading to new versions. DataStax must continue to invest in improving its quality. EnterpriseDB Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., EnterpriseDB supports and markets the PostgreSQL open-source DBMS, which it packages as an open-source community edition and as Postgres Plus Advanced Server, including the Oracle Compatibility Feature.
15. 14 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence Strengths  Community leadership: EnterpriseDB is the primary contributor to the PostgreSQL community. It is responsible for many of the new features of PostgreSQL by contributing to JSON, materialized views and partitioning.  Functionality: Gartner clients report that the functionality of EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Oracle Compatibility Feature is now more than sufficient to run both mission- critical and non-mission-critical applications. Recently, Infor, a major application platform independent software vendor (ISV), added EnterpriseDB as a DBMS platform choice.  Stability and compatibility: Reference customers commend the compatibility with Oracle, the stability of the DBMS and the product support. Cautions  Open-source dilemma: EnterpriseDB must conform to community-led release cycles for its community editions as they go through the open-source process. This can slow the process of enhancing the base open-source product, but not the enterprise edition.  Market exposure: EnterpriseDB lacks breadth in its sales and marketing operations, which restricts its ability to communicate its message to potential enterprise customers. According to our survey, those that did not choose EnterpriseDB would have been more likely to choose it if they had been more familiar with it.  Support and documentation: Reference customers reported a lack of local-language support and weak documentation. FairCom FairCom, which was founded in 1979, is headquartered in Columbia, Missouri, U.S. and privately owned. FairCom c-treeACE (Advanced Core Engine), one of the oldest NoSQL DBMSs, is a fully ACID, key-value store with both NoSQL (Indexed Sequential Access Method [ISAM]) interfaces and SQL, and supports transactions with an embedded or stand-alone engine. Strengths  Strong technology: c-treeACE is a very strong ACID key-value NoSQL DBMS with SQL capabilities and a long history of stability and innovation. Cross-platform support (Unix/Linux/OS X), scalability and strong HA stand out among its capabilities.  Customer base: FairCom has a large customer base, encompassing both stand-alone and embedded implementations. The OEM (embedded) base is itself large and produces sustainable revenue that enables investment in research and development (approximately 25% of revenue).
16. 15 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence  Satisfied customers: FairCom received some of the highest overall scores in our survey, with high marks for customer support, professional services, performance, ease of doing business, ease of operations and HA. Furthermore, over 75% of its reference customers reported no problems with it. Cautions  Marketing presence: FairCom lacks presence in the general DBMS market as it has a relatively small marketing budget. Growth largely comes from within its existing customer base.  Small, largely unknown vendor: FairCom needs greater brand awareness to compete effectively with other operational DBMS vendors, especially the better known NoSQL vendors.  Pricing: Reference customers identified FairCom's pricing model as an issue. We believe this is because other NoSQL vendors offer an open-source pricing model. IBM Headquartered in Armonk, New York, U.S., IBM offers DB2 for z/OS, Linux, Unix, Microsoft Windows and Informix. Depending on the DBMS, IBM offers multiple deployment models, from hardware bundling and appliances to deployment in IBM's SmartCloud or third-party clouds. Strengths  Performance and features: Survey participants rated IBM highly (among the top three vendors) for HA/DR and overall performance. In-memory DB2 with Blu Acceleration reflects IBM's early vision for in-memory DBMSs. NoSQL support includes a MongoDB-compatible JSON API for document-style, cloud delivery via its Cloudant acquisition and via Bluemix, and Resource Description Framework (RDF) for graph models.  Hardware integration: DB2 for z/OS dynamically routes analytics to the IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator (IDAA), creating an efficient HTAP architecture in a single environment and reducing mainframe MIPS to cut operating charges. Other IBM products, such as IBM PureData System for Transactions, use integrated hardware and software.  Global presence: IBM provides support, implementation and services in multiple vertical markets. It has one of the IT industry's largest networks of software, hardware and service partners. Cautions  Sales execution: Like other megavendors, IBM is opaque in its reporting of revenue and customer numbers, but Gartner's RDBMS market share figures indicate that IBM declined in 2013, losing second place in the market to Microsoft.
17. 16 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence  Complexity and pricing: For the second year in a row, survey participants scored IBM low for pricing model suitability. Value for money was considered average. IBM is, however, expanding its aggressive pricing, bundling and simplification efforts.  Software quality: Surveyed IBM customers rated it worst of all the vendors in this Magic Quadrant for "software with bugs or unreliable software," and below average for ease of implementation and ease of operation. InterSystems Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., InterSystems was founded in 1978. It markets Caché, which was originally an object-oriented DBMS but is now a hybrid NoSQL/SQL transaction engine. Caché has a strong position in the healthcare sector. Strengths  Strong functionality: Caché supports a wide variety of data types with object, NoSQL and SQL models, and has strong replication capabilities for HA/DR (as evidenced by strong scores from its reference customers). Database management is automated, so it requires fewer staff resources.  Focused execution: After establishing a solid product and a large ISV ecosystem that is embraced by the healthcare industry, InterSystems is addressing other markets and achieving early success. Strong execution in the healthcare sector is one reason why InterSystems has moved into the Leaders quadrant this year.  Performance: InterSystems received some of the highest scores from reference customers for the overall performance of Caché and for their experience of doing business with the company. This confirms the impression Gartner gets from other interactions with its customers. Cautions  Market perception: Although InterSystems has branched out from the healthcare sector, it is still generally perceived as being a healthcare-only provider. It must pursue a stronger market vision to move into the broader operational DBMS market.  Marketing: InterSystems is a midsize DBMS vendor with potential for continued growth, especially as 60% of its reference customers plan to purchase more from it. Investment in sales and marketing is necessary if InterSystems is to challenge the broader market leaders.  Pricing: InterSystems received relatively low scores from reference customers for the suitability of its pricing model.
18. 17 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence MapR Headquartered in San Jose, California, MapR provides the MapR Distribution, including Apache Hadoop. The M7 Enterprise Database Edition includes MapR-DB, an operational DBMS compatible with Apache HBase. It is available on-premises and through various cloud providers. Strengths  Reliability and performance: Reference customers gave MapR high scores for its HA/DR capabilities and cluster stability. Several commended the performance of MapR's operational DBMS.  Support for emerging use cases: 90% of MapR's reference customers use M7 to capture and analyze machine-generated data, such as log files, clickstreams and connected device data.  Differentiation and focus: MapR differentiates itself from similar vendors through its replacement of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) with the MapR Data Platform, which exposes Network File System access. Cautions  Availability of skills: 60% of the survey respondents did not select MapR owing to concerns about the availability of relevant skills within their organization. Additionally, MapR's scores for ease of programming were well below average.  After-sale support: Reference customers gave MapR lower scores for its support and documentation and for its professional services.  Complexity: Several reference customers remarked on the complexity inherent in deploying MapR's product and the overall immaturity of its ecosystem. MariaDB MariaDB (formerly SkySQL) is headquartered in Espoo, Finland. It markets two products: MariaDB 10, an open-source, in-memory-capable, multimodel RDBMS based on, and fully compatible with, Oracle MySQL; and MariaDB Enterprise, a commercially supported bundle with enterprise-targeted add-on components. Both products are available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS Linux, Ubuntu, Debian (which includes MariaDB in its distributions) and Microsoft Windows. The company is headed by the creators of MySQL. Strengths  Rich functionality: MariaDB offers multiple storage engines, tunable persistence, ACID support with the InnoDB/XtraDB engine, graph storage with Open Query Graph (OQGraph), and support for Apache Cassandra and JSON.  Value: In our survey of reference customers, MariaDB received one of the three highest scores for value for money, as it did for suitability of pricing method. It also received one of the highest scores for "no problems encountered."
19. 18 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence  Strong community and partner network: MariaDB is at the heart of a vibrant MySQL user community and ecosystem. It partners with Linux distribution vendors, IBM, Fusion-io, and organizations offering products for special-purpose storage engines, management, backup and HA, as well as service providers. Cautions  Increased competition: MariaDB is increasingly visible and will face more competition, especially as Oracle's consent decree with the EU regarding MySQL expires in 20151 and Oracle becomes more aggressive.  Scale: MariaDB's reference customers mostly quantified the size of their largest databases as being a few hundred gigabytes at most. To compete at the high end against increasing competition, MariaDB will require more terabyte-size reference customers.  Fragmented offerings: Several customers remarked on the number of separate pieces in MariaDB's software stack; one noted there are "too many independent tools for managing databases." MarkLogic Headquartered in San Carlos, California, U.S., MarkLogic offers a document store DBMS in commercial Essential Enterprise, Global Enterprise and Mobile editions, and free, fully- featured developer versions. Its software can be deployed in VMware and Amazon Web Services environments, and, in collaboration with SGI, as the DataRaptor appliance. In 2014, MarkLogic enters the Leaders quadrant for the first time. Strengths  Features: MarkLogic's mature enterprise features are extended with tiered storage, HDFS support, backup to Amazon S3, JSON, mobile replication, full text search, geospatial capabilities, Sparql language support, Resource Description Framework (RDF) import support and a converter for MongoDB. Its road map is rich and ambitious.  Solid customer base and partner network: We estimate that, following recent sizable wins in the financial services sector, MarkLogic now has over 300 commercial customers. It also has a sizable partner ecosystem, which should add momentum to its recent solid growth.  Customer relationship: Reference customers gave MarkLogic high marks for their experience of doing business with it. Cautions  Pricing challenges: Surveyed customers ranked MarkLogic low in terms of value for money and suitability of pricing model. However, MarkLogic altered its pricing structure in 2013 and lowered its prices, and Gartner expects to see this reflected in future surveys.
20. 19 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence  Difficult to use: Of the vendors evaluated in this Magic Quadrant, MarkLogic received the lowest overall score from survey respondents for ease of programming. For continued growth, delivery of planned product enhancements and programming language support is essential.  Geographic concentration on North America: Well over 80% of MarkLogic's customers are in North America. Its overseas expansion efforts must succeed if it is to compete with global providers. McObject Headquartered in Issaquah, Washington, U.S., McObject offers eXtremeDB version 5.0, a small-footprint relational in-memory DBMS with extended array and vector support. Since 2001, millions of copies of eXtremeDB have been deployed worldwide in embedded and real-time applications. Strengths  Deployment and configuration choices: Typically embedded, eXtremeDB supports Microsoft Windows, Linux, real-time OSs and the Java Native Interface. Clustered configurations are available.  Functionality: eXtremeDB provides full ACID and tunable persistence, multiversion concurrency control, 64-bit support and hybrid storage for scalability.  Partnerships: McObject has partnerships with EMC, Fusion-io, HP, IBM and others. Numerous distributors market its product, and it has customers worldwide. Cautions  Marketing: eXtremeDB's multiple engines and horizontal and vertical scalability remain little-known in the market.  Limited targets: eXtremeDB is still seen as being marketed primarily for embedded applications, although this is changing.  Customer satisfaction: Surveyed customers gave McObject low scores for HA/DR, ease of implementation and ease of operation. These are not all new issues. Given the wide distribution of eXtremeDB version 5.0, they reflect a failure to address continuing challenges. Microsoft Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, U.S., Microsoft markets its SQL Server DBMS for the operational DBMS market, as well as Microsoft Azure SQL Database (a database platform as a service) and Microsoft Azure Tables. Microsoft now has in-memory row-store technology for transactions in SQL Server 2014.
21. 20 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence Strengths  Market vision: Microsoft's market-leading vision consists of in-memory computing (SQL Server 2014 now has full transaction in-memory support), NoSQL (with a new document-store DBMS), cloud offerings (both cloud-only and hybrid cloud), use of analytics in transactions (HTAP) and support of mobility. Its vision for in-memory computing and putting the "cloud first" is ahead of its competitors.  Strong execution: Microsoft SQL Server is an enterprisewide, mission-critical DBMS capable of competing with products from the other large DBMS vendors. Gartner's 2013 market share data shows Microsoft taking second place from IBM in terms of total DBMS revenue.  Performance and support: Reference customers were very positive, with the performance of SQL Server, documentation, support, ease of installation and operation all rated highly. Only 7% reported problems with the DBMS overall. Cautions  Lack of an appliance: Microsoft still lacks an appliance for transactions (one comparable to its SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse appliance), whereas its major competitors (IBM, Oracle and SAP) all offer one.  Market image: Although SQL Server is an enterprise-class DBMS, Microsoft continues to struggle to dispel a perception of weakness in this area. Inquiries from Gartner clients demonstrate a continuing perception that SQL Server is not used for mission-critical enterprisewide applications — a view that inhibits wider use of SQL Server as a primary, enterprise-class DBMS.  HA/DR and pricing issues: Reference customers again found the pricing model for SQL Server unacceptable (they gave it the lowest overall rating of any vendor in this Magic Quadrant) and blamed the price changes that came with SQL Server 2012. Microsoft also received one of the lowest overall scores for ease of implementing HA/DR. MongoDB Headquartered in New York City, New York and Palo Alto, California, U.S., MongoDB offers an open-source, document-style DBMS, as well as MongoDB Enterprise, a commercial offering available in various service tiers. MongoDB Enterprise is available through several cloud providers, as well as on-premises. Strengths  Customer satisfaction: MongoDB received high scores for every measurement of customer satisfaction in the reference customer survey.  Improving enterprise capabilities: Recently announced partnerships with analytics and data integration vendors enable MongoDB to tell a well-rounded information management story.
22. 21 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence  Operational and management support: Continued investment in the MongoDB Management Service simplifies the running of a large cluster in terms of monitoring, backup and recovery, and provisioning. Cautions  Increasingly competitive landscape: Over the past year, several vendors have introduced features that compete with MongoDB's core value proposition. MongoDB will face more pressure to differentiate its offerings against entrenched competitors.  Growing pains: Although many reference customers reported that MongoDB is easy to get started with, several reported challenges architecting MongoDB for large-scale deployments.  Trendiness with developers: MongoDB's popularity among developers means it is often selected before application requirements are understood. This can result in a poor fit of DBMS capabilities to the application. Neo Technology Neo Technology is headquartered in San Mateo, California, U.S. Neo4j is a native graph-style NoSQL DBMS capable of handling transactions with ACID support and clustering for scalability and HA. Neo became an incorporated company in 2011, but began developing its product much earlier, in 2000. Neo4j, which was first used in a production environment in 2003, is offered as both an open-source version and an Enterprise Edition. Strengths  Native graph DBMS: Neo4j is a native graph-style DBMS (as opposed to an existing DBMS to which graph capabilities have been added). It is engineered for performance with transactional ACID capabilities in a single instance and offers tunable consistency across clusters for scalability.  Growth: Since its founding, Neo has seen strong growth from both its open-source version and Enterprise Edition.  Performance and ease of use: Reference customers identified performance, ease of operation and implementation, and ease of doing business as strengths of Neo. Cautions  Graph model: The graph DBMS model is difficult to understand, which lengthens the learning curve. This problem is exacerbated by growing hype from other vendors about the introduction of a graph model on a nongraph DBMS model.  Small vendor: Although the Neo4j product is over 10 years old and has grown consistently, Neo remains a small vendor that faces all the issues of risk and stability associated with small vendors.
23. 22 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence  Pricing model and HA/DR: Reference customers identified Neo's pricing model as an issue. They also expressed dissatisfaction with the product's HA/DR capabilities. NuoDB Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., NuoDB provides an operational DBMS designed to scale horizontally and elastically. In addition to being available in on-premises and developer editions, NuoDB's product is available on Amazon Web Services. Strengths  Delivery and support: NuoDB received top scores for its support and documentation, professional services and ease of programming. We believe this is enabling it to win contracts to replace other vendors in several locations.  Rapid deployment: On average, reference customers estimated it took less than five months to deploy NuoDB's product in production environments.  Support for emerging use cases: 80% of NuoDB's reference customers use it for capturing and analyzing machine-generated data, such as clickstreams, log files and connected device data. Cautions  Inconsistent experience: Although NuoDB received several top scores for service delivery, documentation and support, reference customers that weren't full of praise were highly critical. As a new vendor, NuoDB is still perfecting its service and support.  Slow momentum: NuoDB has not established a footprint in the developer community, which commonly provides informal support and initiates tool development. Gartner clients have yet to show interest in NuoDB during calls to our inquiry service.  Nascent partner ecosystem: NuoDB's partner program is still developing and has yet to attract the necessary numbers to supplement the company's sales and implementation efforts. Oracle Headquartered in Redwood Shores, California, U.S., Oracle markets a complete set of DBMS products for operational systems. These include Oracle Database, Oracle TimesTen, Oracle Berkeley DB, Oracle NoSQL Database and MySQL. In addition to software, several of Oracle's DBMSs are available in engineered systems (appliances). Strengths  Broad range of offerings: Oracle has the broadest product portfolio in the market, covering different DBMSs for multiple purposes (RDBMS, NoSQL, streaming data and mobile). Also, it offers delivery in the cloud, on appliances and as stand-alone
24. 23 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence software. According to Gartner's 2013 market share numbers, Oracle remains in first place for total DBMS revenue market share.  Functionality: Oracle offers extensive functionality, with many new features (such as the JSON data type and Temporal, which replaces Total Recall) and options such as the Oracle Database In-Memory and Oracle Multitenant options, the latter moving multitenancy to the DBMS layer and reducing support and maintenance. Oracle is also pioneering DBMS functionality on silicon, with new SPARC M7 and T7 chips scheduled for delivery in 2015.  Solid performance and availability: Reference customers again identified Oracle's DBMS performance and availability as primary reasons for implementation. Cautions  Public perception of vision: Oracle's marketing continues to downplay its responses to market trends (such as in-memory functionality) until it announces products. Oracle customers who use Gartner's client inquiry service continue to show confusion and disillusionment in this regard, as they have to make assumptions about Oracle's road maps and vision.  "Push back" on appliances: Users of Gartner's client inquiry service show a reluctance to purchase products (such as engineered systems) due to perceived "lock in" to Oracle's proprietary systems — some functions, for example, are available only on Oracle hardware and appliances, such as those in Exadata Storage Server software.  Low cost/value and bugs: Reference customers consider Oracle's products to be expensive and therefore that they have the lowest value proposition. Oracle also received one of the highest scores for bugs reported. Finally, in recent Gartner surveys,2 Oracle received the lowest score for ease of doing business. Pivotal Pivotal, a spinoff from EMC, is headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. It released Pivotal GemFire XD in April 2014, combining GemFire, its distributed in-memory data grid, and SQLFire, its distributed, memory-optimized SQL database, with Pivotal HD, its Hadoop distribution incorporating Hawq (based on the Greenplum massively parallel processing [MPP] column-store DBMS). It is available with Pivotal CF for cloud-based deployment. Strengths  Rich functionality: By combining an in-memory transactional engine with Pivotal HD's Hawq analytic SQL engine, Pivotal enables large HTAP-style combinations of real-time transaction and event processing for closed-loop systems. It offers HA, active-active deployment and rolling upgrade support.
25. 24 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence  Flexible usages: GemFire provides native object-oriented and REST interfaces; Hawq provides SQL analytics. GemFire XD supports structured data, geospatial data, objects, JSON and key-value pairs.  Strong global organization: Pivotal has the resources and installed base of EMC as key assets. They include manufacturing, research, and presale and postsale support worldwide. Cautions  Maturity: Integrating multiple products is a complex process, and GemFireXD has been on the market for only a few months. Pivotal received the lowest survey scores for support and documentation, and below-average scores for ease of implementation and ease of operation — though this is not unusual for an early- stage product. Its analytic appliance does not yet have an operational counterpart.  Pricing and pricing model: Pivotal received very low survey scores for value for money and suitability of pricing method, though its new simplified and flexible pricing model should help to improve matters. Pivotal is one of the world's biggest startups, and its revenue will need to grow rapidly to justify EMC's investment.  Market awareness: The number of inquiries received by Gartner regarding Pivotal products fell to nearly zero after Pivotal was spun off, and has only recently begun to recover. Pivotal's use of the EMC and VMware sales organization is starting to be felt, which is a positive sign. SAP Headquartered in Walldorf, Germany, SAP has several DBMS products that are used for transaction systems: SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), SAP SQL Anywhere and SAP Hana. Both SAP ASE and SAP SQL Anywhere are available as software only, while SAP Hana is marketed as an appliance. Strengths  Leading vision: SAP remains a leader with its vision for HTAP: It now supports most of the SAP applications that run on Hana on a single in-memory database used for transactions and analytics. SAP reports that over 1,000 customers have purchased part or all of SAP Suite on Hana in just over one year of general availability, which underlines the market's interest in HTAP.  Strong DBMS offerings: SAP has seen strong growth in SAP Hana, SAP ASE (now certified for SAP applications) is growing strongly, and SAP SQL Anywhere continues to lead the mobility market in terms of functionality.  Performance: Reference customers again identified performance (scalability and reliability) as a major strength for SAP, awarding it one of the highest scores. Additionally, SAP received the highest score for ease of operation across its DBMS products.
26. 25 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence Cautions  Marketing communications: Interactions with users of Gartner's client inquiry service confirm confusion over SAP's messages about how its DBMS products integrate, where each product can be used, what SAP Hana can and cannot do, and most importantly, whether SAP Hana will be required in the future.  Lack of skills: As inquiries from Gartner clients make clear, skills to support SAP Hana remain scarce in the market.  HA/DR problems: SAP's reference customers (and especially users of SAP Hana) reported the lowest level of satisfaction with their vendor's HA/DR capabilities. For the second year, SAP also received the lowest score for clients' experience of doing business with it; similarly, in recent Gartner conference surveys,2 SAP received the second-lowest score for ease of doing business. TmaxData Headquartered in Bundang-gu, South Korea, TmaxData provides Tibero, an SQL RDBMS featuring various clustering options, integrated encryption and compatibility with other vendors' DBMS products. Strengths  Satisfied customers: Reference customers scored TmaxData above average on most satisfaction measures, and substantially above average for ease of implementation.  Support for mixed workloads: Tibero Active Cluster (TAC) is aimed at transactional workloads using shared disk clustering, while Tibero InfiniData operates in a shared- nothing environment and integrates with Hadoop for analytics workloads.  Several pricing options: Tibero is available in three editions. Each offers different core/processor pricing options and features. Cautions  Limited geographic traction: Despite opening offices in several countries in 2013 and 2014, TmaxData has yet to gain significant traction outside South Korea.  Uneven postsale support: Reference customers gave TmaxData low scores for support and documentation, and for professional services.  Software quality: Although no problems were reported consistently, only half of TmaxData's reference customers reported encountering no problems with its products.
27. 26 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence VoltDB Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., VoltDB markets an in-memory row-store operational RDBMS that is increasingly available via vertical-market partners. VoltDB version 4.3, released in May 2014, is an open-source DBMS available as software only. Strengths  Technology and vision: Substantial SQL-92 functionality, in-memory DBMS architecture and precompiled Java stored procedures drive VoltDB's high performance in support of HTAP use cases. Tunable consistency and JSON support have been added to give developers more flexibility.  Customer satisfaction: VoltDB, the only open-source in-memory DBMS vendor, received above-average scores from reference customers for suitability of pricing and professional services.  Performance and value: As expected for an in-memory DBMS vendor, VoltDB received high scores from reference customers for overall performance of the product and value for the price paid. Cautions  Competitive challenges: VoltDB's small, U.S.-centric sales organization and modest ecosystem are growing, but their small size still limits its ability to reach new customers.  Feature gaps: Although VoltDB customers are overwhelmingly on the newest release, its reference customers identified "some absent or weak functionality."  Revenue model: VoltDB's revenue remains relatively modest according to Gartner's estimates. Extra funding will be needed to achieve the needed growth. A recent $8 million of Series "B" round venture capital funding should help.
28. 27 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence Strategy If we want to be there at the beginning of the new era, we have to break into the American market. Most start-ups and leaders in this field are based over there, and more and more move there once they become more established. This industry is only going to keep growing. In order to establish a brand name in the industry, I must obtain clients in both, the close and open source communities. However, that does not mean complete disregard for European companies. It just means that the future of the industry is not necessarily headed towards Europe, and European firms are usually establishing a stronger presence in America. With this in mind, my priority must be in the scoping of international companies with operations in both Europe and the USA. Versatility Along with the ODBMS market, it is imperative to look at the platform product and services offered to compliment DB products. Many companies are now beginning to sell enterprise software or offer consultancy based around main DBMS products. This is another market that goes hand-in-hand with my target field. With the knowledge I gather along the way, it will be easier for me to adapt quickly to those emerging technologies that will become essential in the market in the near future.
29. 28 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence Target companies Small to medium (start-ups):  Starcounter AB o Starcounter is a combined in-memory database engine and application server for ultra-fast development of high performance business applications.  Snowflake o Snowflake Computing came out of stealth mode in October, debuting the cloud-based data warehousing services it's positioning as a more flexible, easier-to-manage alternative to complex and often very expensive on- premise data warehouse systems. Snowflake's Elastic Data Warehouse, currently in beta, also will be competing with the likes of Amazon Web Services' Redshift and Google's Big Query. ($26mil investment)  Databricks o The open-source software grew out of a development project at the University of California, Berkeley. Databricks offers a Spark-based platform for big data tasks including data transformation, exploration and analytics.  Formation Data Systems o Developer of unified storage to support all formats and media, in September came out of stealth mode with funding of $24 million including support from big-name investors such as Dell. The company is developing Formation XV, or Formation eXtensible Virtualization, a storage virtualization technology based on standard off-the- shelf hardware featuring flash and spinning disk storage and API-based cloud storage.  DataGravity o DataGravity in August came out of stealth mode with the launch of a new storage platform, the DataGravity Discovery Series, which helps customers manage their data and analyze it for business purposes. Raised about $92 million, including a $50 million round of funding unveiled in December.
30. 29 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence  Tanium o The company’s platform is gaining attention for its ability to scale. It can collect information on hundreds of thousands of endpoint devices in seconds, even if they are not connected to the corporate network.  Mirantis o IaaS platform that might pose the greatest threat to the dominant and proprietary public clouds.  Profitbricks o Infrastructure as a Service company from Germany. The price/performance leader in the cloud computing market  NuoDB o Leader in web scale distributed database technology, Established players:  Amazon  CA Technologies  VMWare Legend: Those marked in green have either been approached already; have a contact/lead or already in conversations with.
31. 30 PLAN: | Strategy & Intelligence Conclusion Over my time here, I have built a small network of people that could potentially help me open new accounts. Further, I have gathered attractive candidates to my own ‘database’. I have people ready for the new potential clients. It is imperative that I continue learning about the new technologies and specialize on this field. I will continue to work with Jay and the team, as I believe this is going to be beneficial in the long run, while trying to open up new clients. With your support, I believe I can greatly benefit the company. My ambition is to actually help by delivering.