Mark Hurd, the CEO of Oracle, is a numbers man. In a current CNBC interview, he was requested about competitors from high-flying MongoDB. Rather than reply on to the problem, Hurd stated, “Just look at the numbers and look at the facts, and see what they’re telling you.”
The potential excellent news for Hurd is that these numbers and details could preserve Oracle comfortable throughout its dotage. The potential dangerous information is that those self same numbers and details recommend Oracle has misplaced its manner as a general-purpose database. Oracle is, in brief, appears to have change into the database CIOs will choose to run their enterprise, however to not outline their enterprise. Is {that a} dangerous factor?
Oracle misplaced the developer battle however gained {the marketplace} battle
Put one other manner, how is it that Oracle may be such a miss with builders and but nonetheless print billions of {dollars} in income? I’m guessing Hurd doesn’t care a lot about developer adoption. He seemingly doesn’t care that, measured in reputation, Oracle has been in terminal decline for a few years, as DB-Engines’ information suggests. In truth, for those who take a look at the database applied sciences for which builders ask probably the most questions (indicating manufacturing use) on Stack Overflow, solely MongoDB and PostgreSQL are booming (of the top-five database applied sciences).
No, what Hurd cares about, as he acknowledges in his remarks to CNBC, is the truth that Oracle nonetheless controls roughly half of the worldwide database market, price tens of billions of {dollars}. Never thoughts that, as Gartner analyst Merv Adrian has highlighted, Oracle has misplaced market share yearly since 2013, and collectively the outdated guard relational database gamers have shed practically 5 proportion factors.
Given how entrenched they’ve been for thus lengthy, that also leaves them with roughly 86 p.c of the market, however it’s not excellent news for them that open supply databases, which claimed zero p.c of the paid market ten years in the past, now take greater than 7 p.c, in accordance with Gartner, or that cloud databases from Amazon Web Services and different new business suppliers are additionally booming.
