Challenging the Database Giants: 9 Reasons MarkLogic is Winning

As the NoSQL market continues to shake out, MarkLogic has emerged as the only NoSQL database capable of taking on the database incumbents and winning for mission critical enterprise applications. In the last 30+ years, no one has been able to take on the incumbents and win on their own turf, so how are we doing it? Well, there is a lot to it, but here are the most important ways that MarkLogic is beating the incumbents:

1. Empowering the Enterprise MarkLogic solves a problem that every large enterprise faces – integrating data from silos. Every organization needs to leverage their data more effectively and every organization has their data spread across dozens or hundreds of systems. How do I create customer intimacy when I can’t put together all of my customer data? This isn’t a problem that relational databases are well suited to solve. In fact, it is their rigid schemas that led to the silos in the first place. MarkLogic’s schema-agnostic approach is the answer. It empowers the enterprise to leverage all of their data, from all of their sources, for all of their use cases.
2. Speed to Value Large organizations who want to create 360° views of their data are usually told that they need to start by reconciling the description of all the data in all of their systems before they can do anything else. These types of modeling exercises can literally take years in large organizations and until they are done, the organization derives no value. This slow, costly process also increases the risk window. The business or market may completely change by the time the effort is complete and the opportunity may be lost to a more nimble competitor. MarkLogic’s approach is completely different. You’ve already created schemas for all your data. We load it as is and let you start getting the value from all your data sources right away. You can harmonize some or all of the data formats over time, but you can also do that after you’ve already started to reap the benefits of your data.
3. Data Diversity MarkLogic is a multi-model database. That means that it can handle lots of different types of data in one really well-integrated system rather than a system for each kind of data you have. These days who doesn’t have location data, and unstructured data, and JSON data, and text, and binaries, and XML, and graphs? You really don’t want different systems for each of these because then you’re not getting the integrated view of your data that you wanted. If I’m a health care provider, I need textual notes on my patients, and location information to direct fast treatment, and web form data, and linkages to doctors. All those things are part of how you think about your patients. MarkLogic handles that data diversity seamlessly. The relational providers struggle with this.
4. Agility MarkLogic embraces the distributed, autonomous, agile way that businesses need to run. The incumbent relational providers are anything but agile and it’s not something they can easily fix – it’s rooted in their core model. For example, all of the relational leaders rely heavily on ETL. They have to because of the rigid schema problem mentioned above. ETL tools and the work associated with them can end up being 60% of the cost of your project! And that’s before you’ve done anything useful. Then, when you want to make a change, it’s back to the drawing board. Not very agile. The same is true for ORM (Object Relational Mapping) tools, which have been called the “Vietnam of Computer Science.” ORM is a quagmire that stifles agility but is an inherent consequence of the relational model.
5. Security: More Sharing, Less Risk Having gone to the trouble of integrating data and creating 360° views, organizations want to leverage that value as broadly as possible. At the same time, they need to be very careful about privacy and security. No one wants to end up being the next Equifax. MarkLogic has created technologies that allow users to share data secure in the knowledge that the recipients of that data will only be able to see the information that they are entitled to see. For some users, certain data elements may be removed without a trace. For other users, certain data may be anonymized. No matter what, it is protected at rest and in motion with advanced encryption technologies that integrated with existing Enterprise key management systems.
6. Flexible Deployment Unlike all of the incumbent providers, MarkLogic is cloud neutral. We run in whichever cloud you prefer, with the same version of the product. Of course, the same database also runs in your own data center with technologies that make it easier to migrate to the cloud of your choosing when that makes sense. Want to run production on-premises and DR in AWS? No problem. Want to run on Azure today but know you could move to AWS at a moment’s notice if cost structures change? MarkLogic lets you be ready. Contrast this with cloud only, or single cloud databases that lock you into a single provider and take away your pricing leverage.
7. Standards MarkLogic is built on standard data formats, standard languages, and standard protocols including JSON, XML, Java, JavaScript, XQuery, and REST/HTTP. Virtually every system in the world speaks these formats, with these languages, over REST. This results in an incredibly fluid experience for enterprises integrating MarkLogic into their data fabric. In fact, the only part of a modern IT infrastructure that isn’t built on these standards is the relational database. Once information gets there, it has to be shredded apart and dealt with in a completely different way.
8. Non-Stop Operations Whether you are processing trillions of dollars in trades or protecting national security, the systems you depend on have to be rock solid. They need to be able to deal with the outage of a single computer or an entire data center. They need to ensure that data is consistent and durable. They must be able to tune themselves and even upgrade themselves without downtime or disruption to the mission / operation. We built MarkLogic with all of those characteristics in mind from Day 1 and have hardened the database for over a decade.
9. Commitment to the Database If you look at the incumbents today, they are all losing focus on the database. Their focus is elsewhere. Oracle spends all of their time worried about AWS. Microsoft is all about Azure. SAP, not surprisingly, is focused on applications. Their flagship database products are all taking second or third place. MarkLogic is laser-focused on building the best database to integrate data from silos. In the process, we’re redefining what it means to be a modern database and the role it plays for customers.

When you put it all together, you can see one overarching reason why we are winning against the giants of the database industry – we listen to our customers. They told us that to serve mission-critical enterprise applications, they needed faster time to value, lower costs, more agility, more sharing, absolute trust in the product, the ability to run wherever they need to, and a partner that is committed to working with them.

You might be thinking that all of this is obvious – who wouldn’t want to serve their customers like this? But remember, the giants are victims of their successes. It’s really tough for entrenched vendors to cannibalize their own markets. It’s tough culturally, financially, and technically. MarkLogic carries none of that baggage, which is why you’ll see us continue to innovate with powerful new open source technologies like the MarkLogic Data Hub Framework, Agile Mastering, and more. This is the approach that serves customers best, and serving customers best is the blueprint to beating the giants.

To learn more about moving your organization beyond the limitations of relational technology, download the white paper, Beyond Relational