New Gartner Cloud Database Comparison Report Names MarkLogic a Visionary

We’re happy to announce that Gartner named MarkLogic a Visionary in the newly developed Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems (DBMS).

Gartner defines the cloud database market to be vendors that provide a fully managed public or private cloud DBMS that also uses cloud storage. The report compares 17 such cloud database vendors.

We’re proud that MarkLogic is well-positioned among those 17 vendors. We’re also proud that MarkLogic did so with a single unified product. Most vendors — particularly the large cloud vendors — address multiple use cases with multiple products. MarkLogic is unique in that our cloud solution, MarkLogic Data Hub Service, handles both operational and analytical use cases. This makes MarkLogic ideal for solving modern data integration challenges.

Convergence of Operations and Analytics

With all the previous database reports, Gartner separated the market into two camps:  Operational Databases and Analytical Databases. This new cloud database report merges those categories, leaving some vendors behind in the process.

As Gartner states in their report, “The separation of the DBMS market into operational and analytic tasks has outlived its usefulness. Now each type of use case can be addressed by a single vendor or product.” 

Gartner is 100% correct and we’ve been helping our customers run mixed workloads for over a decade (you can read this blog post from 2014 about a large investment bank doing this). This convergence has led to the creation of new buzzwords recently (HOAP, HTAP, Translytical) and even new product names (MemSQL is now SingleStore). MarkLogic SVP of Product, David Gorbet, discusses this trend in more depth in another blog post. 

Regardless of what name is used, the general idea is the same: organizations want to simplify their data architectures and avoid using two tools when one will do the job. Relying on our search-based indexing and data hub capabilities, MarkLogic does this extremely well.

Who will succeed in this market? I expect we’ll see large cloud vendors continue to grow as they promise an integrated ecosystem. Vendors like MarkLogic will also continue to do well by offering a unified platform (database + data integration + search) that integrates easily into those public cloud ecosystems. The vendors that will struggle are those that offer standalone point solutions, which are much harder to justify when organizations are striving for simplification.

Growing Importance of Data Integration

Another trend that we’re excited to see growing recognition for is the importance of data integration capabilities — something Gartner discusses in the report. This isn’t the first time. Gartner stated in a separate report earlier this year that, “Data integration capabilities will become the most important differentiation and challenge of cloud data ecosystems.”

Data integration continues to be a headache in the cloud. Unfortunately, most cloud data management products are poor solutions for data integration because they rely on the same relational + ETL approaches as their on-premises predecessors. Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Teradata, etc. are still all built around a relational view of the world and are not designed for agile data integration and curation.

Data integration is a capability we started investing in heavily about five years ago. We first launched Data Hub software, followed by MarkLogic Data Hub Service in 2018. Today, MarkLogic data hubs are running in enterprises around the world to solve complex data integration challenges. As a result, MarkLogic is now the leading data hub solution in the market, all built on our Visionary database.

Download the Report

Click here to get a copy of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud Databases.