MongoDB on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems 2015
This week Gartner released its 2015 Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems. In this report MongoDB is recognized as a Leader, putting us in a coveted category of companies with both the ability to execute and completeness of vision.
The recognition of our current position is exciting, but what I find most encouraging is what history now says about our progress. MongoDB has been recognized in this Magic Quadrant since Gartner released the first Operational DBMS report in 2013, when we appeared as a Niche Player: significant, but wanting improvement in both execution and completeness of vision. In 2014 we again appeared in the Magic Quadrant, but this time positioned as a “Challenger”: strong on execution, but we still had work to do in terms of making our vision clear.
While I might not agree with Gartner that we didn’t have a strong vision, their analysis of our trajectory matches mine. When we started MongoDB in 2007, it was to prove that a document-oriented database could alleviate a host of problems that plague application developers. While there was a lot of early validation of that initial concept, we still needed years of building and evolving our product to fully realize it. One way we know we delivered was to see Gartner acknowledge that improvement in execution.
Today we once again find our hard work validated with an acknowledgment that our vision is now far more complete and well articulated. This is exactly the trend I see for MongoDB as well. MongoDB has grown to become a mature, organized, and multi-faceted team, full of talented engineers, able to focus on delivering near-term improvements to MongoDB while at the same time steering our product towards a long-term vision. This versatility is timely, because over the past few years, conversations with our users have taught us far more than we could have known at the outset, about the nature of data itself, and its place in application development. Out of this, we have refined a truly far-reaching vision:
- The database is at the heart of modern applications
- Databases should provide both high performance and high-level functionality -- you don’t have to choose one or the other
- Documents are the right foundation, as they serve the needs of a wide range of applications, and can also function as the basis for other models, like key value.
- A unified and tunable database framework is far better than a portfolio of specialized products, for both development and operations
- Distributed, scaled, cloud infrastructures will be the default, so managing them must be simple
Furthermore, the choices we made, that were radical and untested when we started out, are becoming standard across databases, and the technologies based on them. Our vision drives more than just our product, it drives the industry as a whole. It’s a great time for MongoDB; we’ve got so many great clients, a great roadmap, and a great team capable of delivering it.
About the Author - Eliot Horowitz
Eliot Horowitz is CTO and Co-Founder of MongoDB. Eliot is one of the core MongoDB kernel committers. Previously, he was Co-Founder and CTO of ShopWiki. Eliot developed the crawling and data extraction algorithm that is the core of its innovative technology. He has quickly become one of Silicon Alley's up and coming entrepreneurs and was selected as one of BusinessWeek's Top 25 Entrepreneurs Under Age 25 nationwide in 2006. Earlier, Eliot was a software developer in the R&D group at DoubleClick (acquired by Google for $3.1 billion). Eliot received a BS in Computer Science from Brown University.