My friend, Gartner analyst Adam Ronthal, has updated his famous “spaghetti chart” of DBMS market share for 2023, and as usual, even a quick inspection is very instructive. The leading 4 (AWS, Microsoft, Oracle and Google) held their positions. Some “hot” players are continuing to rise, while old stalwarts continue to hold on or drop further.
For example, IBM and SAP remained unchanged in the 5th and 6th positions. And rising into 7th was Snowflake, overtaking Alibaba cloud to continue its rapid ascent – from 13th in 2021. Just how quickly they can overtake SAP and IBM is the next question – and it may not take long. This is one of several examples of hyperscalers outside the top tier flattening out or losing position. MongoDB also rose, passing Huawei to move into 9th. Tencent bucked the trend, moving up into 11th as Teradata’s precipitous slide carried them downward for the second straight year.
More Market Movement Below
In general, the second group of ten in the stack ranking was more volatile than the top group. However, Cloudera held its position, leveling off after last year’s drop. And then we come to the interesting case of Databricks. Gartner allocates some of Databricks’ revenue into the Analytics market numbers. It’s hard to figure better comparability with the companies above them, because one has to ask about the degree to which similar parceling out of revenue occurred for those other players, and we don’t know that. It’s possible that Databricks actually should be farther up this chart; they did move into 14th place, passing Intersystems.
Adam introduced a Churn Index into this year’s analysis, measuring the percentage of vendors who passed or were passed in the rankings. I’m looking forward to seeing his calculations for previous years – it’s an interesting measure of market activity. And there were many changes. Other strong upward moves were made by Datastax, Redis Inc, Couchbase and Neo4j. By contrast, the acquisition of MarkLogic by Progress in February did not help it in the rankings – the combined entity ranks where MarkLogic last year. We’ll see if accretive power raises them in 2024. A similar challenge awaits Opentext (shown here as MicroFocus, which OpenText acquired in January 2023), which dropped as a number of smaller players vaulted past them.
Competing For A Small Piece of The Future
In this part of the chart, revenues are below the $500M line, and volatility is high – a few 7 or 8 figure deals in a given year can vault a firm multiple positions. The overall picture remains one of stability at the top and churn below, but outside the top group, the vendors are competing for only about 20% of the overall market.
The recent emergent stars are still on the move, and should continue to make inroads, while others will pin their hopes on capturing some momentum from new AI workloads.
That will require rapid development and/or integration of the necessary new technologies, building and operating effective partnerships within the emerging ecosystem of other providers – and strong marketing and delivery to capture even the opportunities within their installed base. Expect all your mainstays to tell you just how much better their AI is than anyone else’s.
And don’t believe them till they prove it to you.