Exasol update
I last wrote about Exasol in 2008. After talking with the team Friday, I’m fixing that now. 
The general theme was as you’d expect: Since last we talked, Exasol has added some new management, put some effort into sales and marketing, got some customers, kept enhancing the product and so on.
Top-level points included:
- Exasol’s technical philosophy is substantially the same as before, albeit not with as extreme a focus on fitting everything in RAM.
- Exasol believes its flagship DBMS EXASolution has great performance on a load-and-go basis.
- Exasol has 25 EXASolution customers, all in Germany.*
- 5 of those are “cloud” customers, at hosting providers engaged by Exasol.
- EXASolution database sizes now range from the low 100s of gigabytes up to 30 terabytes.
- Pretty much the whole company is in Nuremberg.
MarkLogic 5, and why you might care
MarkLogic is releasing MarkLogic 5. Key elements of the announcement are:
- More-of-the-same in line with MarkLogic’s core positioning.
- A new bi-directional Hadoop connector.
- A free MarkLogic Express edition, limited in license terms more than in actual features, as per Slide 27 of the deck MarkLogic graciously supplied for me to post.
Also, MarkLogic is early with a feature that most serious DBMS vendors will soon have – support for tiered storage, with writes going first to solid-state storage, then being flushed to disk via a caching-style algorithm.* And as befits a sometime search-engine-substitute, MarkLogic has finally licensed a large set of document filters, from an Australian company called Isys. Apparently, the special virtue of the Isys filters is that they’re good at extracting not only text, but metadata as well.
*If there’s a caching algorithm that doesn’t contain a major element of LRU (Least Recently Used), I don’t recall ever hearing about it.
MarkLogic seems to have settled on a positioning that, although distressingly buzzword-heavy, is at least partly based upon reality. The real part includes:
- MarkLogic is a serious, enterprise-class DBMS (see for example Slide 12 of the MarkLogic deck) …
- … which has been optimized from the getgo for poly-structured data.
- MarkLogic can and does scale out to handle large amounts of data.
- MarkLogic is a general-purpose DBMS, suitable for both short-request and analytic tasks.
- MarkLogic is particularly well suited for analyses with long chains of “progressive enhancement” (MarkLogic’s favorite term when talking about derived data).
- MarkLogic often plays the role of a content assembler and/or search engine, and the people who use MarkLogic in those ways are commonly doing things that can be described as research and analysis.
Based on that reality, MarkLogic talks a lot about Volume, Velocity, Variety, Big Data, unstructured data, semi-structured data, and big data analytics.
| Categories: Hadoop, Market share and customer counts, MarkLogic, Scientific research, Solid-state memory, Structured documents, Text | 1 Comment |
NoSQL notes
Last week I visited with James Phillips of Couchbase, Max Schireson and Eliot Horowitz of 10gen, and Todd Lipcon, Eric Sammer, and Omer Trajman of Cloudera. I guess it’s time for a round-up NoSQL post.
Views of the NoSQL market horse race are reasonably consistent, with perhaps some elements of “Where you stand depends upon where you sit.”
- As James tells it, NoSQL is simply a three-horse race between Couchbase, MongoDB, and Cassandra.
- Max would include HBase on the list.
- Further, Max pointed out that metrics such as job listings suggest MongoDB has the most development activity, and Couchbase/Membase/CouchDB perhaps have less.
- The Cloudera guys remarked on some serious HBase adopters.*
- Everybody I spoke with agreed that Riak had little current market presence, although some Basho guys could surely be found who’d disagree.
| Categories: Basho and Riak, Cassandra, Cloudera, Clustering, Couchbase, HBase, Market share and customer counts, MongoDB and 10gen, NoSQL, Open source, Oracle, Parallelization | 12 Comments |
Ingres deemphasized, company now named Actian
Ingres, the company, is:
- Changing its name to Actian.
- Deemphasizing Ingres, the product.
- Emphasizing a set of products that don’t exist yet (or at least aren’t shipping), namely lightweight mobile apps that are business-intelligence-plus-an-action, and technology for building them. These are called “Action Apps”, and are discussed on the Actian company blog.
- Positioning all this as something to do with “big data” (what a shock).
It turns out that Actian was the name of an ancient athletic competition commemorating Augustus’ defeat of Anthony at Actium, a battle that was more recently memorialized in the movie Cleopatra. Frankly, I think Cleopatra Software might have been a more interesting company name, although that could mean execs would have to arrive at sales calls rolled up in a carpet.
| Categories: Business intelligence, Hadapt, Ingres, Market share and customer counts, VectorWise | 7 Comments |
The database architecture of salesforce.com, force.com, and database.com
salesforce.com, force.com, and database.com use exactly the same database infrastructure and architecture. That’s the good news. The bad news is that salesforce.com is somewhat obscure about technical details, for reasons such as:
- A long-ago marketing decision to not give infrastructure details, so as to convey a “Don’t worry; we’ll take care of everything” message.
- Even so, a long-ago and perhaps now-regretted marketing decision to disclose and even exaggerate salesforce.com’s reliance on Oracle, as part of an early-days attempt to prove salesforce was using enterprise-class technology.
- A desire to hide the recipe for salesforce.com’s secret sauce.
- Force of habit — I’m not sure salesforce even knows how to tell its technical story with any clarity.
Actually, salesforce.com has moved some kinds of data out of Oracle that previously used to be stored there. Besides Oracle, salesforce uses at least a file system and a RAM-based data store about which I have no details. Even so, much of salesforce.com’s data is stored in Oracle — a single instance of Oracle, which it believes may be the largest instance of Oracle in the world.
| Categories: Data models and architecture, Market share and customer counts, Memory-centric data management, Object, OLTP, Oracle, salesforce.com, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 14 Comments |
salesforce.com, force.com, database.com, data.com, heroku.com — notes and context
As previously noted, I attended Dreamforce, the user conference for my clients at salesforce.com. When I work with them, I focus primarily on database.com and related businesses. I’ve had to struggle a bit, however, to sort out the various pieces, and specifically the differences among:
- salesforce.com. This is the parent company, and the runaway leader in the SaaS (Software as a Service) enterprise application market, especially in the area of CRM (Customer Relationship Management).
- force.com. This is salesforce.com’s application development stack split out for other SaaS vendors to use, both inside and outside the CRM segment. It can be referred to as a PaaS offering (Platform as a Service). force.com relies on a proprietary salesforce.com language called APEX, which has a strong stored procedure/ database trigger orientation.
- database.com. This is the database part of force.com, spun out separately in general availability as of Dreamforce two weeks ago.
- data.com. Also launched at Dreamforce (and based, if I understand correctly, on an acquisition), this is a provider of 3rd-party data you might use as inputs to your CRM systems.
- Heroku. Another salesforce.com acquisition, Heroku is in essence a PaaS competitor to force.com. Heroku is focused on Ruby and Java, and supports a number of DBMS, SQL and NoSQL alike.
- AppExchange. This is a marketplace for things designed to integrate with salesforce.com (and perhaps also apps built on force.com). The latest claim is that there are 1200+ AppExchange offerings.
- The complete set of SaaS apps built on force.com. A 2008 white paper refers to 47,000 organizations being “supported” by force.com. Recently I’ve heard a figure just under 100,000. I’m not clear as to what that metric measures — aggregate users of SaaS apps built via force.com? Clearly there are a lot of SaaS apps built on force.com, with actual customers, but I don’t know how big “a lot” is. (Perhaps a salesforce.com person could chime into the comment thread with some clarity.)
| Categories: Market share and customer counts, Pricing, salesforce.com, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 2 Comments |
Hadoop notes
I visited California recently, and chatted with numerous companies involved in Hadoop — Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, DataStax, Datameer, and more. I’ll defer further Hadoop technical discussions for now — my target to restart them is later this month — but that still leaves some other issues to discuss, namely adoption and partnering.
The total number of enterprises in the world paying subscription and license fees that they would regard as being for “Hadoop or something Hadoop-related” probably is not much over 100 right now, but I’d expect to see pretty rapid growth. Beyond that, let’s divide customers into three groups:
- Internet businesses.
- Traditional enterprises ‘ internet operations.
- Traditional enterprises’ other operations.
Hadoop vendors, in different mixes, claim to be doing well in all three segments. Even so, almost all use cases involve some kind of machine-generated data, with one exception being a credit card vendor crunching a large database of transaction details. Multiple kinds of machine-generated data come into play — web/network/mobile device logs, financial trade data, scientific/experimental data, and more. In particular, pharmaceutical research got some mentions, which makes sense, in that it’s one area of scientific research that actually enjoys fat for-profit research budgets.
| Categories: Cloudera, Hadoop, Health care, Hortonworks, Investment research and trading, Log analysis, MapR, MapReduce, Market share and customer counts, Scientific research, Web analytics | 5 Comments |
HP/Autonomy sound bites
HP has announced that:
- HP is buying Autonomy.
- HP is pulling back from WebOS.
- HP may spin off its PC business altogether.
On a high level, this means:
- HP is doubling down on enterprise IT.
- HP is taking a more software-centric approach to the enterprise IT business.
- HP is backing away from the consumer electronics business.
- HP in particular is backing away from the generic desktop/laptop PC business, which may with only moderate exaggeration be regarded as:
- The intersection of the enterprise IT and consumer electronics businesses.
- The least attractive sector of each.
My coverage of Autonomy isn’t exactly current, but I don’t know of anything that contradicts long-time competitor* Dave Kellogg’s skeptical view of Autonomy. Autonomy is a collection of businesses involved in the management, search, and retrieval of poly-structured data, in some cases with strong market share, but even so not necessarily with the strongest of reputations for technology or technology momentum. Autonomy started from a text search engine and a Bayesian search algorithm on top of that, which did a decent job for many customers. But if there’s been much in the way of impressive enhancement over the past 8-10 years, I’ve missed the news.
*Dave, of course, was CEO of MarkLogic.
Questions obviously arise about how the Autonomy acquisition relates to other HP businesses. My early thoughts include: Read more
| Categories: HP and Neoview, Market share and customer counts, Structured documents, Text, Vertica Systems | 10 Comments |
Couchbase business update
I decided I needed some Couchbase drilldown, on business and technology alike, so I had solid chats with both CEO Bob Wiederhold and Chief Architect Dustin Sallings. Pretty much everything I wrote at the time Membase and CouchOne merged to form Couchbase (the company) still holds up. But I have more detail now. 
Context for any comments on customer traction includes:
- Membase went into limited production release in October, and full release in January. Similar things are true of CouchDB.
- Hence, most sales of Couchbase’s products have been made over the past 6 months.
- Couchbase (the merged product) is at this point only in a pre-production developer’s release.
- Couchbase has both a direct sales force and a classic open-source “funnel”-based online selling model. Naturally, Couchbase’s understanding of what its customers are doing is more solid with respect to the direct sales base.
- Most of Couchbase’s revenue to date seems to have come from a limited number of big-ticket “lighthouse” accounts (as opposed to, say, the larger number of smaller deals that come in through the online funnel).
That said,
- Most Membase purchases are for new applications, as opposed to memcached migrations. However, customers are the kinds of companies that probably also are using memcached elsewhere.
- Most other Membase purchases are replacements for the Membase/MySQL combination. Bob says those are easy sales with short sales cycles.
- Pure memcached support is a small but non-zero business for Couchbase, and a fine source of upsell opportunities.
- In the pipeline but not so much yet in the customer base are SaaS vendors and the like who use and may want to replace traditional DBMS such as Oracle. Other than among those, Couchbase doesn’t compete much yet with Oracle et al.
- Pure CouchDB isn’t all that much of a business, at least relative to community size, as CouchDB is a single-server product commonly used by people who are content not to pay for support.
Membase sales are concentrated in five kinds of internet-centric companies, which in declining order are: Read more
Introduction to Zettaset
Zettaset is confusing, but as best I understand:
- Zettaset sells Hadoop add-on/enhancement software, with what might be called an enterprise-friendly Hadoop management focus.
- “Business intelligence” gets mentioned prominently in Zettaset’s marketing, but not in what executives now say. Apparently the BI focus is old news, predating a hard pivot.
- Zettaset’s marketing also mentions NoSQL, for little reason that I can discern, except insofar as Zettaset relies on HBase.
- CEO Brian Christian told me that Zettaset has been around since December, 2007; on the other hand, Zettaset press release boilerplate says Zettaset was founded in 2009. Apparently, the distinction is that Zettaset was founded in 2007 as a consultancy, but turned its efforts to software development in 2009.
- Zettaset has fewer than 20 people but is “hiring like mad.”
- Zettaset just did a $3 million Series A round — or maybe is just announcing it now; the latter interpretation might explain how those 20ish people are getting paid.
- Zettaset’s product was just launched and made generally available, notwithstanding that Version 2 of Zettaset’s product was shipped last year to fanfare on Zettaset’s blog.
- Zettaset’s pricing is based on how many terabytes of compressed data it is being used to manage.
- Until very recently, Zettaset was called GOTO Metrics; I imagine the name change is connected to the strategy pivot.
- Zettaset told me of one big customer — with an almost-petabyte Hadoop cluster before compression — namely Zions Bancorporation.
- Zettaset has “a number of paying customers” overall.
| Categories: Hadoop, HBase, MapReduce, Market share and customer counts, Zettaset | 4 Comments |