Tag: databases

Salesforce faces the end of the database era

Cloud CRM giant Salesforce faces a challenge as searching unstructured data and analytics companies like Splunk change the business model.

Last week we looked at the way we organise information is changing in the face of exploding data volumes.

One of the consequences of the data explosion is that structured databases are beginning to struggle as information sources and business needs are becoming more diverse.

Yesterday, cloud Customer Relationship Management company Salesforce announced their Wave analytics product which the company says “with its schema-free architecture, data no longer has to be pre-sorted or organized in some narrowly defined manner before it can be analyzed.”

The end of the database era

Salesforce’s move is interesting for a company whose success has been based upon structured databases to run its CRM and other services.

What the company’s move could be interpreted that the age of the database is over; that organising data is a fool’s errand as it becomes harder to sort and categorise the information pouring into businesses.

This was the theme at the previous week’s Splunk conference in Las Vegas where the company’s CTO, Todd Papaioannou, told Decoding The New Economy how the world is moving away from structured databases.

“We’re going through a sea change in the analytics space,” Papaioannou said. “What characterised the last thirty years was what I call the ‘schema write’ era; big databases that have a schema where you have to load the data into that schema then transform before you can ask questions of it.”

Breaking the structure

The key with programs like Salesforce and other database driven products like SAP and Oracle is that both the data structures — the schema — and the questions are largely pre-configured. With the unstructured model it’s Google-like queries on the stored data that matters.

For companies like Salesforce this means a fundamental change to their underlying product and possibly their business models as well.

It may well be that Salesforce, a company that defined itself by the ‘No Software’ slogan is now being challenged by the No Database era.

Paul travelled to San Francisco and Las Vegas as a guest of Salesforce and Splunk respectively

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Big Data needs big databases

Investors are making big bets on the databases that underpin Big Data

While the tech industry’s startup hype this week has been focused on the impending Twitter Initial Public Offering, a much more fascinating company quietly completed a major capital raising.

MongoDB provides an open-source, document database program and last week raised another $150 million from investors that values the company at $1.2 billion dollars.

Databases lie at the heart of Big Data and businesses need better computer programs to manage the overwhelming amount of information that’s pouring in every day.

As every business is unique, larger corporations find they spend huge amounts of money on their databases. The enterprise that buys an Oracle, IBM or SAP system usually spends tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in adapting the system to work for them, often with less than spectacular results.

While implementing MongoDB or any other open source program doesn’t eliminate implementation costs, it is often easier to setup and maintain as most of the information about the system is shared and freely available rather than locked inside the vendor’s proprietary knowledgebases.

Probably most important of all, the data structures themselves are open so customers don’t find themselves locked into a relationship with one vendor because all their information is in a format that can only be read by one system.

Open source is where Big Data, social media and cloud computing intersect – without the data itself being open and accessible, most cloud computing and social media services will almost certainly fail.

So MongoDB and the other open source products are the quiet, back of house technologies that keep the internet as we know it ticking along.

Bloomberg Businessweek reports there’s some very serious investors in MongoDB.

The deal attracted new investors such as EMC Corp. (EMC:US) and Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM:US), along with previous backers Red Hat Inc. (RHT:US), Intel Corp. (INTC:US), New Enterprise Associates and Sequoia Capital, according to MongoDB.

Sequoia Capital are one of the longest lasting Silicon Valley venture capital firms whose greatest success was being one of the first investors in Apple Computers and New Enterprise Ventures have a similar pedigree with companies like 3Com, Juniper Networks and Vonage. Investment by industry leaders like Intel, Red Hat, Salesforce and EMC in the company also shows MongoDB isn’t the standard Silicon Valley Greater Fool play.

When there’s a gold rush, it’s those selling the shovels who make the big money and the investors in MongoDB and similar services are hoping they’ve found some of the modern day shovels.

That may well turn out to be the case and while the smart folk make more money from the technologies that drive social media and cloud computing services, the rest of us are distracted by the latest shiny thing.

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