Gartner’s Cloud Database MQ: Who Didn't Make It and Why

Research firm forecasts 'substantially reduced' vendor landscape by 2025

Gartner’s famous Magic Quadrant has long served as a proof point of a vendor’s relevance in its respective market. I get emails and press releases from companies that make the list. And crickets from those who don’t.

The research firm released its most recent MQ for Cloud Database Management Systems in December. Twenty companies made it into the quadrant, where they are categorized as Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, and Niche Players.

What about the database companies that didn’t make it into the MQ? At the bottom of the report are “honorable mentions,” a kind of consolation prize. In the most recent MQ, the honorable mentions are Crate.io, DataStax, EDB, Micro Focus, MongoDB, Neo4j, Tencent, TigerGraph, Yellowbrick Data, and Yugabtye.

I would note that the Cloud Database Report has its own list of Top 20 cloud database vendors. There’s some overlap, and also differences, with Gartner’s MQ.

For example, DataStax, Neo4j, and Yugabyte are in the Cloud Database Report’s Top 20, but not the Gartner MQ. Conversely, the Gartner MQ includes Alibaba, Cloudera, Exasol, Huawei, and MarkLogic—none of which are among the Cloud Database Report Top 20.

I don’t want to get into a tit-for-tat with Gartner. They do a good job of explaining who made it into the MQ, who didn’t, and why. But following are a few of my observations on some of the key players not included in Gartner’s Cloud Database MQ for 2021.