Looking Back on 12 Years of Constant Innovation

Enterprise-Ready in Version 1

It’s not easy to be both innovative and enterprise-ready from the start, but MarkLogic was. Initially launched as Cerisent XQE Server 1, the first version of MarkLogic carried patents for its innovative way of storing data, and also included ACID transactions, application services, and backup/restore.

Very few technologies are enterprise-ready in version 1, let alone version 2, 3, or 4. Even Oracle didn’t even have many of its enterprise capabilities such as role-based security and backup recovery until version 7, more than a decade after they first started selling software.

Yes, the software world moves at a faster pace right now, but that often comes with a price. In the effort to get to market faster, database companies have often decided to focus first on doing many of the easy things. Most NoSQL databases just try and ignore ACID transactions and security, even though they know those things are important. Unfortunately, it is much harder to go back and add in the enterprise features later on, and so it comes as no surprise when we see a bunch of large database companies making acquisitions in order to fill the gaps where they made sacrifices early on.

Having a strong foundation is critical, and MarkLogic has had that from the start. And, in the past decade, MarkLogic has proven itself in hundreds of enterprise organizations that require an enterprise-class database.

Thriving for Over a Decade

How many database companies are over ten years old? The database market doesn’t have room for inferior technologies. There is a reason that the incumbent leaders – Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft – have remained dominant for so long.

Most organizations don’t take their investment in a new database lightly, and MarkLogic has been able to continue to prove to be a valuable asset to organizations again and again. In fact, MarkLogic’s first customer still runs enormous clusters with hundreds of Terabytes of data on MarkLogic. And, since first launching, that organization and hundreds of others have continued to upgrade and use the innovative new features that MarkLogic comes out with in every new release.

MarkLogic’s founder, Christopher Lindblad, created an innovative, patented technology over a decade ago. And now, over 12 years later, innovation is still happening every day. In our last release, we launched a feature called Bitemporal – and right now MarkLogic is the only NoSQL database to have this feature. We’re also the only NoSQL database that has an integrated triple store for storing documents, data, and triples in the same system.

Take a look at how far we’ve come…

The Next Twelve Years

Whenever we talk about MarkLogic with people for the first time, we always end with the question, “What Will You Reimagine?” This question isn’t just for customers though. It’s also for us.

The product team is already planning for the next release, MarkLogic 9, and we are again reimagining what can be done to make MarkLogic even better. And this is when we look to you, our customers, to join us and to work with us in the effort to continue our long track record of innovation in building features and solutions that matter. (And I’m actually giving you an open invitation here, we take suggestions from customers for new features very seriously, so please get in touch!)

Change happens fast and we don’t expect to stop here. MarkLogic is still a young company, and we look forward to growing even stronger over the next twelve years.