Around this time last year, Gartner named Percona a Challenger in the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems (Gartner Operational DBMS MQ). For those not familiar with these, Magic Quadrants (MQ) are a set of market research reports published by Gartner that provide qualitative analysis into a market by highlighting its participants, relevant trends, and overall depth.
While we were excited with our first placement in the Gartner MQ, Percona elected to be excluded in the 2016 Gartner Operational DBMS MQ due to changes in the inclusion criteria this year, one of which was an emphasis on venture capital funding.
While many of the companies featured in the MQ provide open source software, they also sell proprietary or open core versions of their software. Open source companies are formed as an alternative to commercial software companies. To a company backed by investors, and a board of directors looking to maximize revenue and market capitalization, open core or business source licenses (BSL) are an attractive prospect. However, the reasons for moving to a monetized-software model misses the point of open source companies.
At Percona we ship all our software as open source, and make it easily accessible to everyone. We have been doing it the “hard” way for the last 10 years, by avoiding the entanglements of venture capital. This gives us the freedom to plan reasonable and achievable growth rates without sacrificing our open source ideals.
Percona will continue to focus on what we think is important to our customers, our users and the open source database market as whole:
- We are committed to remaining the unbiased champions of open source database solutions by providing our customers and the market with the best solutions to meet their needs
- We are proud of our 10-year anniversary as a bootstrapped open source company, and will continue to celebrate this achievement through the remaining months of 2016
- We will continue to provide open source technical expertise and thought leadership on our blog and webinars, participate in industry events and host the Percona Live Open Source Database Conferences.
Our model at Percona is keeping our enterprise-grade software, such as Percona Server for MySQL, Percona Server for MongoDB, Percona XtraDB Cluster and Percona Xtrabackup, completely open source and free. Our commitment to open source remains attractive to our customers because it prevents vendor lock-in. And being a successful open source company means prioritizing the value of your customer solutions over selling software. We pair our products with great services, such as Support for MySQL and MongoDB, RDBA for MySQL and MongoDB and Percona Care.
We enjoyed working with Gartner last year and look forward to working with them on future MQs as criteria continues to evolve.
In the meantime, we will always strive to put the customer first. At every phase of Percona’s journey, we remain very grateful to the customers who trust us with their database environments. We will continue to earn and honor that trust.
About the Author
Peter ZaitsevPeter managed the High Performance Group within MySQL until 2006, when he founded Percona. Peter has a Master's Degree in Computer Science and is an expert in database kernels, computer hardware, and application scaling.
Right you are, Peter.
There is no sensible reason for Gartner to add a “is there VC funding” prerequisite. It artificially filters for no apparently benefit.
I would add any more – if anything for Open Source project venture funding puts it in higher danger of failure in the end as it allows company to operate with the huge revenue-expenses gap and if new funding does not materialize there might not be sustainable way to continue. Recent sad example here is RethinkDB https://rethinkdb.com/blog/rethinkdb-shutdown/
Gartner is a big reason IT is dying and DevOps is taking over. Gartner drags down every IT dept dumb enough to follow their advice. They are at best lagging and in many cases just wrong. How long did they pimp Itanium when anyone with an IQ above 50 in the industry knew it was doomed. Look at how late or wrong Gartner is on storage trends. Everyone in MySQL knows Percona as a DB power house. If a few pointy haired IT higher ups don’t see you in the report all the better. They probably have an aging busted infrastructure they built out on Gartner’s suggestion: DB’s running on 8 year old servers, rotational drives in RAID5 on an unreliable FC SAN. Probably paying for some expensive EMC backup solution that doesnt work.
I am sorry to say, the rules applied to the magic quadrant are totally disconnected from the real world.
You look at the list of products, MySQL is not represented there. It means that Gartner is completely ignoring the operational DB choice made by the vast majority of the companies that have online operations of some sort.
I may be wrong (but it looks like the rule still applies), MySQL can’t be in the MQ because only the main product of a vendor is allowed, so it is Oracle DB. And by dropping MariaDB and Percona there are no MySQL-based distributions, apart from fairly different options such as MemSQL.
Ivan,
I think this comes from another strange requirement which Gartner has which is one company can be presented only be one product. Oracle is obvious reason why this is wrong – they own most popular commercial operational database (Oracle) and most popular Open Source one (MySQL), not to mention many other databases in this space – TimesTen, Oracle NoSQL Database etc.
This however is the problem for Percona too as we have Percona Server for MySQL, Percona XtraDB Cluster and Percona Server for MongoDB which all have different properties and benefit.
If you look at this rule – this means once the company is acquired (like MySQL) it disappears from Magic Quadrant which makes a little sense if Magic Quadrant is to use a guide which technologies to consider.