Strategic Shifts: The 'New' Oracle and MongoDB
It's no longer enough to be merely a database company, as Oracle and MongoDB pursue new visions of what's next
It’s been another busy week in the database market as I catch up from a trip to San Francisco, where I participated in the Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon. Here’s my take on two of the big announcements of the past week.
What is Oracle?
Let’s start with Oracle’s just-completed $28 billion acquisition of electronic health records provider Cerner. It’s a milestone in Oracle’s ongoing transformation into something more than a database company. But what is Oracle if not a database company?
This shift has been underway for 20-something years — I think of Oracle’s acquisition of PeopleSoft in 2004 as an earlier milestone. Now with Oracle’s acquisition of Cerner you can see the path ahead. “This is now our primary mission at Oracle,” Larry Ellison said in laying out Oracle’s ambitious strategy with Cerner.
The grand plan includes building a “unified national health records database,” which is meant to solve the problem of fragmented and balkanized data that has plagued, frustrated, and hampered doctors and patients alike going back to my childhood.
If in fact Oracle can develop an EHR database that is timely, comprehensive, secure, and accessible to individuals/patients, it will be a breakthrough. Let’s see how far they get, and how fast they get there, in an industry that has been slow to adopt digital transformation.
Other components of the Oracle-Cerner plan include a new patient engagement system, which will let patients communicate with healthcare providers via a mobile app. The system will incorporate heart rate, blood pressure, etc., from wearables, which is not a new idea, but compelling if it connects back to a centralized EHR database.
And they plan to modernize Cerner’s existing Millennial clinical system to better support telemedicine, disease-specific AI models, clinical trials, and more.
The big trend here is that Oracle and other tech companies are aggressively moving into industry verticalization after years of building out horizontal cloud services.
“Healthcare is the largest and most important vertical market in the world — $3.8 trillion last year in the United States alone,” Oracle CEO Safra Catz said in December when Oracle revealed plans to acquire Cerner.
Of course, Oracle still develops its flagship autonomous database, but it is moving upstream as part of a long-term growth strategy. “Cerner will be a huge additional revenue growth engine for years to come,” Catz said.
I’m not the only one who thinks Oracle is morphing into something more than a database company. Here’s what Wikibon analyst Marc Staimer said during a recent Silicon Angle webcast:
“I don’t view Oracle as a database company anymore,” said Staimer. “I view Oracle as a cloud company that happens to have a significant expertise and specialty in databases. They still sell database software in a traditional way, but ultimately they’re a cloud company.”
The comment that Oracle is a cloud company prompted laughter from Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller, perhaps because Oracle is a different kind of cloud company than AWS, Google, or Microsoft. (I hope I am doing justice to Marc and Holger’s POVs here. If not, I will happily set the record straight.)
So what is the new Oracle if not a database company?
Here’s how Oracle describes itself: “Oracle offers integrated suites of applications plus secure, autonomous infrastructure in the Oracle Cloud.”
That’s what they call “boilerplate” in the world of PR & Marketing. Interesting that the word “data” doesn’t appear anywhere. Hmm.
Far be it from me to tell Oracle what business it’s in, but the big picture is that Oracle is a modern, cloud data management and applications provider with deep industries expertise.
Oracle does not, in my opinion, have a strong multi-cloud story to tell, but Ellison is trying to fix that with the forthcoming MySQL HeatWave, which he says will be available on AWS and Microsoft Azure. We’re still waiting for a formal announcement of that new capability. It seems to be taking longer than expected.
What is MongoDB?
In contrast to Oracle, there’s MongoDB, which is doubling down on its roots as a database company.
At MongoDB World this past week, MongoDB introduced a new “vision,” although anyone who has been following the company like I have may wonder what’s really new here.
Until recently, MongoDB’s boilerplate was as follows: “MongoDB is the leading modern, general purpose database platform empowering innovators to create, transform, and disrupt industries by unleashing the power of software and data.”
Note the emphasis on “modern, general purpose database.” MongoDB wanted to be everything to everyone.
Things changed on June 7 with MongoDB’s new tagline:
“MongoDB is the developer data platform company empowering innovators to create, transform, and disrupt industries by unleashing the power of software and data.”
So the company is shifting gears from general purpose database to developer data platform.
I worked at Mongo in 2020 and talk of MongoDB as a “data platform” sounds very familiar. And Mongo has long focused on the developer audience.
So what’s really different?
For one thing, Mongo has deemphasized the “general purpose database” message. I find that significant in a market where there’s growing debate over general purpose databases vs. special purpose databases.
No doubt, Mongo continues to see itself as a general purpose database, but it’s shifting the spotlight to the data platform — and to developers.
The data platform concept is a level up from the underlying database management system, as I explained in the Cloud Database Report 2022. Here’s an excerpt:
The cloud database market increasingly is less about the core database management system itself and more about the data platform and overall cloud environment inclusive of AI/ML, analytics, data distribution, migration tools, etc. The platform model is one of the great advantages of the cloud. It’s much easier for vendors and customers alike to assemble comprehensive data environments that make it possible to import data from disparate sources, run algorithms, distribute data across regions, and more.
For more, see the full report at the link below.
So the question is: Why did MongoDB change its messaging?
The answer, I think, can be summed up in one simple statistic: 750 million new digital applications by 2025.
That’s the IDC forecast that MongoDB president and CEO Dev Ittycheria shared during his MongoDB World keynote, and it’s all you really need to know about the opportunity ahead.
CTO Mark Porter (former Oracle, by the way) chimed in:
“There will be more applications built over the next four years than were built in the first 40 years,” Porter said. “The pace of innovation is increasing, and that means developer productivity is essential.”
Something to watch, however, is a comment made by Ittycheria on Mongo’s Q1 FY2023 earnings call a few days before all of the talk about new applications. “Growth of existing applications is a much smaller contributor to our medium and long-term growth than the addition of new workloads.”
Not surprisingly, at the same time that the company is sending kisses and hugs to developers, Mongo execs continue to cast aspersions on the relational database model that is the signature of Oracle.
“Developers building modern applications find that the relational databases simply cannot serve all their needs,” said Ittycheria. “Relational databases hinder the ability to innovate quickly, are too expensive and don't scale to meet the performance demands of today's modern applications.”
So the SQL vs. NoSQL battle continues. On that front, I remind everyone that earlier this year Oracle introduced its own MongoDB API.
Mongo responded in kind at MongoDB World with the announcement of a new SQL interface for its Atlas cloud database service that supports queries from SQL tools (Oracle and others).
Here’s the full announcement of MongoDB’s vision and the new features that go with it.
Divergent paths on a collision course
Oracle and MongoDB seem to be moving in different directions.
As a 45-year-old software company, Oracle is transforming itself by expanding into new markets. It has little choice because it’s losing share in the database market, as I’ve reported (see below).
And Mongo is sticking to its roots because that’s where the action is. Many businesses are driving innovation and differentiation by developing new apps.
In summary:
Oracle has more points of entry because it has the full tech stack and plays to a wider audience, including CIOs, CTOs, CFOs, data scientists, and line of business managers. And a national health records database would be a major advance for global healthcare.
MongoDB’s big advantage is the popularity of its document database model for new app dev, and its multi-cloud availability.
Both companies are fighting for hearts and minds of customers. They’re pursuing two very different models, but ultimately they remain on a collision course.