Oracle, Snowflake, MongoDB: Who's Winning the Battle for Customers?
Quantity, quality, deal size, and product mix are all part of the equation
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Snowflake, MongoDB, and Oracle each announced quarterly financial results over the past two weeks and, as tech companies often do, they showcased some of their latest and greatest customer wins.
We also got a snapshot of each company’s total customer count. Looking strictly at the aggregate numbers, MongoDB has about 5X as many customers as Snowflake, and Oracle has 13X MongoDB.
Of course, there’s more to the story. Let’s take a look.
Snowflake - 5,900+ Customers
Snowflake was first out of the gate with the March 2 announcement of its Q4 and FY22 earnings. The company had a total of 5,944 customers at the end of January 2022, a 10% increase compared to the end of Q3 FY22.
FYI, here’s how Snowflake does the math:
“For purposes of determining our customer count, we treat each customer account, including accounts for end-customers under a reseller arrangement, that has at least one corresponding capacity contract as a unique customer, and a single organization with multiple divisions, segments, or subsidiaries may be counted as multiple customers. For purposes of determining our customer count, we do not include customers that consume our platform only under on-demand arrangements.”
Snowflake had 184 million-dollar customers, i.e. those representing trailing 12-month product revenue of $1 million or more. That’s up from 148 million-dollar accounts the previous quarter, a 24% increase.
Worth noting: Snowflake’s $1M accounts grew faster than its total customer tally. “In the quarter, we added 14 Fortune 500 and 21 Global 2000 customers,” said CEO Frank Slootman.
On the earnings call, one analyst noted that Snowflake’s “net new” customer count did not grow as fast as in previous quarters, and asked, “How should we think about the pace of total customer growth going forward?”
CFO Mike Scarpelli responded:
“We don't focus on absolute number of customers. It's more on the quality of customers. And as we've talked about before, Fortune 500 is not a great metric because it's too U.S.-centric, and we're actually focused more on Global 2000….It's really going after quality, large customers. And you will see fluctuation in the number of new customers we land in the quarter, but that fluctuation tends to be from small customers.”
Scarpelli pointed out that Snowflake’s impressive Net Revenue Retention rate of 178% reflects expansion within existing customers. So not only did Snowflake gain more big accounts, but there’s increased usage within accounts.
“Snowball effect,” quipped Slootman.
Snowflake puts its customers front and center on its website home page, placing them above its own data cloud messaging. Last time I checked, these were the customers highlighted: Square, Citi, Morgan Stanley, ADP, Chipotle, Under Armour, Pinterest, Adobe, NBC Universal, DHL, Instacart, Capital One, JetBlue, and Kraft Heinz.
MongoDB - 33,000+ Customers
In its Q4/FY22 earnings announcement on March 8, MongoDB said it had “continued strong customer growth with over 33,000 customers as of January 31, 2022.”
But that “strong growth” characterization depends on whether you are talking about all customers or just the biggest ones. MongoDB’s total customer base grew from 31,000 in Q3 to 33,000 in Q4, a modest 6.5% increase.
It was in larger accounts that MongoDB had something to brag about. “We ended the year with over 33,000 customers, of which over 1,300 are six-figure customers and 164 are $1 million-plus customers, the latter number growing nearly 70% year over year.”
So MongoDB—like Snowflake—is seeing faster growth among larger accounts, a signal that it’s gaining a foothold in the enterprise. It’s “evidence that customers increasingly view MongoDB as a strategic platform,” said Ittycheria.
MongoDB gave these examples:
Sogei, an IT company operated by the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance, chose MongoDB for a government project to verify that citizens have been vaccinated, tested negative, or recovered from Covid-19.
Box is using MongoDB for its content migration solution, Box Shuttle.
Insulet, a medical device company, migrated to MongoDB Atlas to reduce costs and simplify database management.
MongoDB said customer growth is being driven by adoption of the company’s cloud database service, Atlas. The vast majority of MongoDB customers, 31,500, are using Atlas. That’s up 34% from a year ago.
Going forward, Ittycheria said, MongoDB will increasingly target companies it refers to as “digital natives,” which he described as “fast-growing mid-market customers who are building software and not just buying software.”
Oracle - 430,000+ Customers
Oracle did not provide a customer count when it announced its Q3 FY22 earnings on March 10. Instead, it rolled out out its big gun, Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison, who talked at length about customer wins during the earnings call with analysts, as he often does.
I’ll get to Ellison’s remarks shortly, but first the raw numbers. On its ‘Customer Success’ webpage, Oracle claims to have 430,000+ customers. It doesn’t segment that total, so there’s no easy way to tell how many of those customers are large enterprises vs. SMBs, or database vs. SaaS customers.
Oracle highlights hundreds of customers though case studies and journalistic-style storytelling. (Disclosure: I helped establish an editorial team at Oracle that produced dozens of such stories and wrote many of them myself, when I worked at Oracle a few years ago.)
In Oracle’s most recent quarter, customers in the spotlight included Albertsons, Arm, Canon, GM Financial, Hilton, IHG, and Vodafone.
So, what did Larry Ellison have to say about all of this? He called attention to the fact that Oracle now has over 10,000 customers for the company’s Fusion ERP and HCM SaaS offerings.
Ellison focused first on the healthcare vertical, where Oracle is expanding through the pending acquisition of Cerner. In FYQ3, Oracle signed Community Health Services, Franciscan Missionaries Health System, Entegris Health, and Nemours Children’s Health—which together represent a bunch of hospitals moving to Oracle ERP, HCM, and SCM cloud apps.
In financial services, recent wins included TD Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and Societe Generale. Apparently, there’s more to come. “We will get Paribas very soon,” he predicted.
Ellison also called out competitive wins over SAP at Canon, Johnson & Johnson, Haemonetics, Canada’s Saskatchewan Health Authority, and Tata Steel.
Keep in mind that Ellison was talking about SaaS customers, not database customers. The line gets fuzzy because Oracle database software is likely running underneath many of those SaaS implementations, but there was little or no discussion of the tech stack.
On the other hand, Ellison did talk at length about Oracle’s recently launched MySQL HeatWave database, quoting a bunch of unnamed analysts. However, he didn’t name any new HeatWave customers, so I came up with a few on my own: Fancomi, Red3i, and Tetris.co.
And the Winner Is…
Each of these vendors had good progress to report in the battle for the hearts, minds, and budgets of business customers.
The fact that Snowflake and MongoDB are signing $1M customer deals faster than net new customers shows that both companies are getting a stronger foothold in the enterprise with their cloud database offerings.
Oracle, on the other hand, has many more customers, but it’s talking about SaaS not database management. Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure business grew an impressive 47% in FYQ3, but Oracle does not break out its database offerings for more detailed analysis.
Oracle, Snowflake, and MongoDB are each in the Cloud Database Report’s list of Top 20 vendors. You can download the Top 20 chart in the article below.
One final note: Ellison said that MySQL HeatWave will become available on AWS and Microsoft Azure “in a few weeks.” It will be interesting to see which customers opt for Oracle’s latest database offering in these non-Oracle cloud environments.
Thanks for ungating. Great article!