DBMS Revenues 2023 – Beyond the Top Ten

In my last post, I described the changes at the top of the $103.2B revenue DBMS market, with trends we have watched as they evolved and matured over the past few years. As in that post, I will note significant changes Gartner made in their prior year revenue estimates, with a nod to some other changes changing the landscape.

The DBMS vendors below the Top Ten are a combination of fading stalwarts, aggressive, differentiated newcomers, mid-level players hitting their stride as mature companies, and a few surprises. In this part of the landscape, mergers, acquisitions and alliances regularly change the picture. In just the past few weeks we have watched announcements from Databricks, Cloudera, and others in the DBMS ranks – as well as adjacent players such as Informatica and Boomi adding to their stacks in the extended data management (sometimes called the “modern data stack” or some variant) sweepstakes.

The Second Ten DBMS Vendors

Let’s begin with vendor number 11, Tencent.

Tencent’s number for 2022 was raised $127.5M by Gartner. Had the resulting number been published last year,  they would have been ahead of Cloudera. They are as of 2023, with 19.7% growth to $1.1B – their first billion-dollar year. They closed the gap between themselves and tenth place Huawei as well.

Teradata’s number for 2022 was raised $10M. They grew 8.4% in 2023 to $1.1 B, below market growth, making them the last billionaire vendor in the 2023 listings. They got their revenue back to where it was in 2021, but dropped further out of the Top Ten.

Cloudera grew well below the DBMS market at 5.7% to $907M, a bit slower than the year before. They remain short of their elusive first billion dollar year in DBMS revenue.

Databricks grew 41.8% to $767M, making them the fastest growing of the Second Ten. This continued their rapid rise, jumping them ahead of Intersystems. They are on pace for their first billion-dollar year in 2024, and a likely move up the chart a place, or even two.

Intersystems’ number for 2022 was restated up $59.3M. This dampens perceived growth but they were still able to grow 6.3% to $764M. That was below market growth, and they ended up behind Databricks.

Progress acquired MarkLogic, completing the transaction in February 2023. Their combined revenue for 2022 had been shown as $665.5. But as restated, the 2022 revenue is now $313M – composed of $85M (MarkLogic)  + $228M (Progress).
For 2023, MarkLogic is shown as 0 and Progress is $300M.
(Some of Progress’ revenue in earlier year estimates was likely misclassified, based on discussions that were already underway when I was still at Gartner – evidently they were corrected with this year’s publication.)

Datastax DBMS revenue for 2023 was up 14.2% to $228M. This is slightly better than the market rate, and a bit better growth than last year. Solid performance, but the competition is catching up.

Redis Labs’ number for 2022 was restated down $3M. They grew a very impressive 37.7% to $223M. Although they are facing increased competition from other versions of Redis, their ability to deliver these results suggests they will move up the ranks in 2024.

Fujitsu’s number for 2022 was restated down $42M to $214M – and Gartner estimates the same number for 2023. Growth of 0%. Their trend has not been positive, so competitive threats are worth watching.

Couchbase grew 19.1% to $168M, a solid growth year, and they entered the Second Ten. Their growth has been steady and consistently above market rate for several years.

Third Ten And Beyond

Neo4j’s estimated revenue number for 2022 was raised $5M, and Gartner now estimates that they grew a well-above market 24.8% to $156M – knocking on the door of the second ten. With the adoption of the GQL standard graph query language by the ISO, Neo4j is well positioned to continue its above-market growth as the leading graph DBMS vendor. Its Cypher language was a core component of the new standard and Neo4j took a strong role with many leading industry partners in driving the process.

HPE continued its steady decline, dropping 8.13% to $141M after a flat year in 2022.

EnterpriseDB’s number for 2022 was restated from $518.9M to $109M – back to their level in 2015. They grew from that to $132M in 2023, or 21.1%. And dropped 8 places.

Rocket Software’s number for 2022 was restated down $37M. They grew 9.3% to $131M – less than their revenue in 2021.

CockroachDB revenue grew 47.5% to $110M – a very good year, and their first time over $100M. A similar year in 2024 will likely m0ve them up several places in the rankings.

Singlestore’s number for 2022 was raised $3.7M to $90M. They grew 12.2% to $101M, making them another new $100M player.

Hitachi’s number for 2022 was dropped  $10M to $91M. In 2023, they thus grew 2.2% to $93M.

Broadcom closed its VMWare acquisition in November 2023.  Gartner showed revenue for them separately in the published numbers. Broadcom’s number for 2022 was restated to 0. They were assigned $29M for this year. VMware (which now includes Pivotal for those keeping track of lineage) dropped 24.8% to $87M.

TigerGraph grew 36.5% to $61M. Given its financial challenges and executive turnover, this is a very good result. Their repositioning away from a pure graph DBMS message will be tested in 2024.

Influx Data was added to the named vendor ranks, the first time-series DBMS vendor listed. They join the chart with two years of data – $45M and $56M, delivering an above-market growth rate for InfluxDB of 24.4% to enter the Third Ten.
(Gartner collects a number of other vendors into something called, unsurprisingly, Other Vendors – which grew from $753M to $846M, just below market.)

Aerospike’s number for 2022 was dropped $10.1M to $40M; they grew 30% from that number to $52M (which is close to last year’s original number). They dropped out of the third ten.

MariaDB grew 19.4% to $48M. This is a good result under the circumstances; they underwent executive changes in 2023 and as of this writing are in yet another extension of the consideration of an offer for acquisition by Progress.

OpenText (new) was added with $42M for 2023. Micro Focus was dropped; OpenText closed its acquisition of them in January 2023. Its revenue (presumably mostly from Vertica) for the prior year was stated as $57M, suggesting that so far, growth has not been achieved.

PingCap was added with $18M and $35M (growth of 94.4%). Formed in China, the now US-based firm offers TiDB, an open source, distributed SQL database with MySQL compatibility.

ClickHouse was added with $15M and $23M – 53.3% growth. It is positioned as an open-source column-oriented DBMS for online analytical processing (for those of you too young to remember, we used to call that OLAP.)

Summing Up

Several vendors were dropped from the named ranks and their revenues are accounted for within the Other Vendors number: Software AG, TMax and Actian (now a part of HCL, another data management portfolio builder). Some years ago, when I was working in this space at Gartner, we predicted substantial industry consolidation and the disappearance of many brands in the wake of the transition to cloud. That has come to pass, and even accelerated recently. But it is offset somewhat by the rise of specialized – often nonrelational – alternatives that have effectively competed with the hybperscalers in lucrative corners of the market.

It’s my belief that consolidation and innovation will be accelerated by the wave of AI-washing every vendor is currently engaged in.

Some will successfully enhance and even innovate within their product families. Others will not.

Some will assert they have done so, long before their products are generally available. Others will effectively integrate, partner, and listen to their customers to focus the innovations where they will do the most good.

In other words – the more things change, they more they stay the same. Stay tuned. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.