Gartner: Microsoft #1 in Database Revenue; AWS Passes Oracle; Google Cloud Gains
The Top 5 vendors concede ground to the rest of the pack
I just returned from a week’s vacation, and the database industry has been relatively quiet except for this: Oracle dropped a notch in database revenue marketshare, ceding its former #2 position to AWS, according to Gartner.
Also: Microsoft ranked #1 in 2021, as it did the previous year. Google Cloud moved up into the #4 spot, displacing SAP. IBM dropped to #5.
So Gartner’s top 5 ranking by database revenue for 2021 looks like this:
Microsoft - 24.0%
AWS - 23.9%
Oracle - 20.6%
Google - 6.5%
IBM - 5.6%
As you can see, Microsoft and AWS are neck and neck at #1 and #2. You can read Gartner analyst Merv Adrian’s overview here.
The changes are not surprising. As I wrote in January,
“Microsoft, AWS, and Google Cloud are becoming the new center of gravity in the database market.”
Meanwhile, Oracle, IBM, and SAP each lost marketshare and slipped in the standing, in Gartner’s estimation.
What Happened?
How have the Big 3 cloud providers succeeded in nudging Oracle and the others down the Gartner marketshare ranking? In my earlier analysis, I identified the following characteristics that help explain the Big 3’s emergence as database powerhouses:
Continuous innovation. Each offers a steady stream of improvements.
Fast & easy integration. Surrounding services such as storage, data migration, IoT, ML frameworks are part of an integrated, overarching infrastructure and architecture.
Purpose-built databases. Each offers a range of database options, both home-grown and third-party, for different types of workloads, such as data warehousing, transactions, application modernization, graphs, etc.
Flexible deployment options. The cloud providers offer both fully managed and self-managed database services, and solutions for hybrid and multi-clouds.
You can download my full industry analysis (published in February) below.
‘Stunning Growth’
The changing of the guard is happening in a rapidly growing database market as more workloads continue to be deployed and migrated to cloud-based databases.
Per Gartner, the DBMS market (on-premises and cloud combined) grew 22.3% in 2021 to nearly $80 billion. That’s twice the size of the market five years ago.
Cloud services represented 49% of database revenue in 2021. “The growth has been stunning,” notes Adrian.
Gartner analyst Adam Ronthal shared the chart below that shows the DBMS musical chairs over the past 10 years.
The Rise of Cloud-Native
During 2021, the big, established database vendors gave up ground to rising cloud-native database providers like MongoDB, Snowflake, Databricks, et al.
The top 5 accounted for 80.6% of overall market revenue in 2021, down from 86.9% the previous year. Even Microsoft, at #1, lost a bit of share year to year — 24.0% in 2021 vs. 24.3% in 2020.
It seems almost certain from Gartner’s trend analysis that 2022 will be the year that cloud DB revenue surpasses on-prem revenue. In other words, legacy vendors will be under continued pressure.
Revenue vs. Innovation
It should be noted that this latest Gartner report is an estimate of marketshare based on revenue. A vendor may have lots of innovation but little revenue. And vice versa.
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Cloud DBMSes better reflects the relative strengths of competitors using criteria other than revenue. It’s a different lens into the market. See my earlier post on Gartner’s MQ below.