The Database Generation Gap

Pretty much everyone in tech in the Bay area has touched Oracle at some time or another—even if only while driving past the behemoth sign on highway 101. My experience with Oracle occurred during the mid- through late ’90s when Oracle was exerting its dominance in the emerging relational database market and I was part of the PR agency helping the cause. At that time, data had changed, and therefore the way we managed data had changed making an alternative to the mainframe essential for businesses to thrive. Oracle filled the void.

Twenty years later, we are experiencing yet another data evolution in which data volume and variety are exploding. To manage this explosion, many organizations have created data silos and are now struggling to quickly and affordably integrate data from these silos in order to maintain an agile infrastructure that lets them better compete and improve efficiencies.

And now, MarkLogic, led by Gary Bloom — the same person who led the relational revolution while at Oracle — is filling the database gap by leading the Enterprise NoSQL revolution. I emphasize Enterprise because MarkLogic often gets lumped into the stripped down, open-source NoSQL crowd but we’re decidedly enterprise-worthy with features like government-grade security, high availability, and semantics. (Don’t take it from me, take it from our customers — and Gartner.)

Last year, 50 percent of our revenue came from projects that first began on Oracle but were unable to be completed either on time and/or on budget and so those organizations turned us. Here’s a sampling of a few:

After examining options such as relational and open source databases, the MarkLogic database was the best option to meet our targets … The agility helps us to ingest massive amounts of heterogeneous data ‘as is,’ integrated search makes the data more accessible, while the enterprise features such as security and elasticity allow us to deliver this on a global scale to the most demanding customers. As a result, we have dramatically improved the customer experience and our clients’ ability to optimize their risk profiles.

–Jens Blohm, Managing Director of Life & Health Northern & Central Europe, and COO of the Life and Health Business Group, dedicated to the system and service portfolio of Hannover Re in the Life & Health space

With the aim of building the industry’s best tax service, the Institute moved its flagship digital service from a relational database to MarkLogic. As well as providing the flexibility required, the MarkLogic database allows the Institute to enrich its content, create new member services and deliver information to all browsers and mobile devices.

The organization’s goal was to integrate a huge level of data, bringing together in excess of 300,000 pages of tax content including archive material in Word, PDF, XML, and HTML. By choosing the MarkLogic database, the Institute was able to easily digest and digitize information in any format and make it searchable. MarkLogic’s scalability and flexibility mean that the Institute can also add recorded audio/visual content from its conferences and lectures in the future and make it easily accessible with the power of MarkLogic’s search engine.

The MarkLogic database enabled us to assemble customer information, from all over our company. Aligning this data into a single view, or ‘golden record,’ gives us the ability to help our customers with their work and analysis, and connect our advertisers with our customers. This community building, through the connecting of personalized content, is an important component of our growth strategy. We could not do this through traditional relational databases. Using the MarkLogic database for this project provided us incredible ROI. With a minimal investment in the technology, we discovered a 600 percent more effective way to match customers to events, as well as dropping opt-out rates for our B2B marketing team.”

Gene Bishop, Vice President of Technology, ALM

I recently switched into a new role here at MarkLogic, from Public Relations to Customer Engagement & Marketing. This would be daunting except for one very important fact: Our customers are exceptional. Their data visions are extraordinary and their execution upon our technology nearly always surpasses their expectations—and sometimes even ours.

My favorite part of working for MarkLogic is attending our MarkLogic World user conferences and chatting with our customers. It’s easy to drink the corporate Kool-Aid, but it’s uplifting to hear from so many different types of customers around the world that our technology actually works (and works well) in today’s modern data era. These data innovators are using the MarkLogic database to propel their competitive advantage as well as shine a spotlight on their individual professional brands.

As I grow into this new role, I am so excited to continue meeting new and existing customers, learning from them as our engineers learn from them, and working with them in lock-step to continue innovating our technology to meet their—and industry—needs and tell their data innovation stories. And if you want to be a data innovator, again, don’t take it from me—take it from our customers who say your data deserves more than just relational. It deserves new generation technologies that meet new generation data needs.