Why MarkLogic Will Lead the Next-Generation of Database Technology

More than once, MarkLogic has been sarcastically described as the “adult” at the venture capital-fed NoSQL party, a presence akin to a chaperone at a high school dance.

I couldn’t agree more, and I couldn’t be happier about it. Having an “adult” serving enterprise-class companies with enterprise-class database technology and services is an important advantage for MarkLogic as we enable many of the world’s largest companies and governments to solve their modern data challenges.

Big Data is big business and companies who do it well will thrive.Those who don’t will fall behind. Those winning enterprises need to have insight into the data they store and they need to operationalize their business based on this insight. They need to build and run next-generation operational and transactional applications that maintain the integrity of the data and transactions, and they need enterprise-hardened data security and flexible data governance.

Open source NoSQL players are struggling with business models and their lack of transactional support (often referred to as ACID). Their lack of data security also leaves their products too immature for today’s enterprises. Relational incumbents, as noted in my most recent post, don’t offer the technology that meets today’s modern database challenges. The market is increasingly aware that there are cases to use Hadoop and cases not to use Hadoop and that there are places where a NoSQL database makes sense versus a relational database.

We believe NoSQL is the next-generation technology for the modern enterprise. That’s why we’ve spent years engineering our database and honing a winning business model that’s as revolutionary and impactful today as relational was 35 years ago — even more so given the central importance of data in every aspect of the 21st-century business.

Of all the NoSQL challengers, only MarkLogic offers the features that enterprises need, including government-grade data security and full transactional support. This is why we’ve become the virtual standard for NoSQL databases in the world’s leading financial institutions and it’s why well over 50 percent of our business comes from completing projects that were started on and failed on Oracle.

Gartner’s most recent Magic Quadrant report for Operational Database Management Systems underscores my position. Of all the companies in the challengers’ quadrant, MarkLogic achieved the highest placement for its “ability to execute.”

We enable enterprises to efficiently access tons of data by integrating it from disparate data silos. We give them the 360° view of data needed to turn it into actionable business decisions and processes. The incumbent relational database technology was never designed to solve this data silo problem and smaller, next-generation, open source players can’t bring this data together.

While Oracle has a winning business model that’s designed to keep enterprises tied to old, no longer cutting edge technology via licensing agreements, new open source database players have yet to prove they can sustain themselves by monetizing open source projects. Moreover, they are increasingly at risk from the cloud-native databases, which are able to handle the same relatively simple workloads.

MarkLogic customers expect extremely powerful capabilities, robustness, security, and cloud-neutrality that isn’t available from the cloud vendors or the open source vendors. These enterprise customers also want a fully integrated solution that doesn’t require them to become de facto software integrators as they try to assemble the necessary search engine, application services, and database features to keep up with competitors. Our system means enterprises can leave data management to us, whether on-premise or in the cloud, while they work on growing their business. When we make a change, it’s all fully integrated and the enterprise customer only notices a benefit — nothing more.

Wikibon estimates that entities will derive $1.2 trillion in new value from Big Data in the coming decade. For decades to come, enterprises who are data rich but information poor will fall to others who can harness, secure, analyze and act on humungous amounts of insightful data. We will be there, the adult in charge.