August 29, 2008
Sales figures for analytic DBMS
One of my clients asked how many new customers I thought were buying analytic DBMS each quarter. I don’t generally track such things, but hey — a client asked, so I did the best I could. And since I did the work, now I’ll share it generally. To wit:
- Teradata, Netezza, and Sybase are publicly traded companies. You can find out a lot from their SEC filings, which I prefer to find via the SEC’s own EDGAR site. (For most purposes, including this one, restrict yourself to forms 10-K, 10-Q, and S-1.) More detail may often be found on the companies own investor relations press releases, investor conference calls, and so on. Anyhow, the bottom line is that some form of customer count figure is public information.
- Vertica claims 50 paying customers, all within the past year. Greenplum also claims 50 paying customers, almost all within the past year.
- The other new analytic DBMS vendors one usually hears about — e.g. ParAccel, InfoBright, Kognitio, Exasol — are individually in the onesie-twosie range. Taken together, the newer companies have on the order of 10 new accounts/per quarter. (OK, Kognitio isn’t really that new a company, but for most other purposes it belongs on the list.)
The client agreed with these figures.
Upon review, that figure of 10 could probably be made to look too low, just by expanding the list of vendors enough. E.g., how many copies of NeoView sell each quarter? How many commercial users are there of the open source MonetDB? Still, when assessing the “mainstream” market, it doesn’t feel misleading.
And by the way, different analytic DBMS vendors sometimes have the same new customers.
Comments
Leave a Reply