A review of the winners and losers in the Gartner 2015 Operational Database Magic Quadrant.
The recent release of Gartner’s new Operational Database Magic Quadrant has caused a bit of a stir as Microsoft has yanked the top right corner ownership away from Oracle.
Microsoft’s stellar performance is largely down to it’s ability to deliver a broad database capability integrating the Azure Cloud, NoSQL and in-memory capabilities and to be honest delivering on it without breaking the bank.
The new Magic Quadrant also shows the rationalisation taking place in the NoSQL market with MongoDB, Datastax (Cassandra) and Couchbase putting in strong performances and the smaller players (e.g. Aerospike) falling behind. I do think the cautions around performance testing and NoSQL are a little misleading, but I presume it’s really a reflection of the market testing and selecting the right technology and realising that different vendors have their own use cases where they excel.
The other noticeable change is the new entrants, specifically the Database as a Service (DBaaS) providers in Amazon and Redis Labs which come in to the report ranking very highly.
With 31 vendors meeting Gartners strict criteria, this demonstrates how the market is currently going through significant growth and disruption, so while Microsoft and Oracle fight it out for top spot the Commercial Open Source and DBaaS vendors are getting ready to eat a large part of their lunch!
If you are looking to review your database strategy, please have a look at our N4{Rethink} service which provides a full market analysis benchmarked against your specific requirements.