Why Database-as-a-Service is bringing a revolution in the enterprise market

DBaaS is the fastest growing sector of cloud platforms, and for good reason says Ken Rugg

Historically the database market has been dominated by a handful of vendors and one in particular has enjoyed an oligarch's lifestyle, including the obligatory superyacht, driving massive revenues from its mature established customer base.

However, in the last five years online commerce and digital upstarts have been turning traditional business models upside down, which is leading to a shake-up in their choice of database platform. Their application developers have been looking for open source database alternatives to legacy options like Oracle to underpin their new database infrastructures. Now, the revolution is spreading to the mainstream as large established corporates are following the lead of these digital native companies and increasing their use of open source databases. One reason it is taking hold is advent of Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS), which is enabling users to spin up instances in the cloud far more rapidly.

Why is this database revolution succeeding when previous database innovations have failed to unseat the incumbent vendors? Gartner predicts that 70 per cent of new enterprise applications will be run on open source databases by 2022 and 50 per cent of all commercial relational databases will be converted in the same time period. But that does not guarantee that it will actually happen. The greatest force in legacy databases is inertia, so why is this generation of open source competitors different?

There is something more fundamental in the air, which is not driven by a philosophical or idealistic principal around the use of open source, but a pragmatic business reality. Today's digital business world demands IT systems, including databases, that are responsive and agile so that companies can access and analyse their data in real-time to take advantage of new business opportunities or fend off competitors.

Initially, NoSQL databases were seen as the solution as they allowed DBAs and developers to spin up databases without having to adhere to the rigid structures of SQL.

Today, though, there is a realisation that narrowly specialised data stores have some significant limitations. Businesses have to be able to access and analyse all the data in their organisations, whether it is structured or unstructured and be able to reuse it, not just in the initial application it was created in. This requires an integrated approach to database management, while still retaining the agility of quickly spinning up instances. This is a very different driver for change that requires operational agility along with the ability to apply sophisticated data processing techniques and tools and heralds the arrival of Database-Platform-as-a-Service (DBPaaS) as the enabler allowing companies to adopt open source databases.

Gartner has found DBPaaS to be the fastest growing segment in the PaaS sector and predicts it will reach $10 bn by 2021. The reason for this rapid growth is its ability to enable customers to break free of past concerns about vendor lock-in and support the huge demand for agility. It creates opportunities for a new breed of open source vendors because DBPaaS requires a different approach since it is delivered in a more dynamic way than the old fashioned product upgrade cycles of the traditional commercial database vendors.

Of course, the old school database vendors say they are moving to the cloud, and touting great success, but there is some debate about how successful that transformation has really been. This more agile approach can be difficult to master when you have spent 40 years building up a proprietary on-premises database business.

Open source is much better suited to DBPaaS, because it is inherently more agile thanks to the constant engagement of its communities, who regularly provide fixes and incremental innovations to improve the end product. Also being based on open source principles negates some of the challenges around integration and the movement of data between different cloud environments. If you want to spin up a new database instance you can do so quickly; if you want to close down an instance and move it to another database environment you avoid the costly and complicated licensing constraints of the traditional commercial providers.

The stakes are high. Gartner is becoming more demanding about the functionality offered by the vendors in its Magic Quadrant and many open source-based database companies no longer feature. Being open source-based does offer the advantage of delivering radical and incremental innovation more quickly and at a fraction of the cost, but to meet the demands of today's enterprise customers requires an integrated approach to database management.

The exciting opportunity for open source-based database companies who can deliver this complete proposition is that DBPaaS will drive a further wedge into the revenue streams of the traditional commercial vendors. Being able to quickly spin up instances will lead a revolution in how customers choose their database vendors that might have some oligarchs retreating to their superyachts.

Ken Rugg is chief product and strategy officer at EnterpriseDB

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