10gen company basics
10gen, as you probably knew, is the company behind MongoDB. I’ve talked with Dwight Merriman of 10gen a few times, which is why his thoughts were featured in at least three different posts on NoSQL/document-oriented-database generalities. I also talked a month ago with new 10gen President Max Schireson (who at one point was the #2 guy at MarkLogic) and CTO Eliot Horowitz. After some delay, 10gen gave me permission to post some January, 2011 slides that summarize company status, target markets, customer brags — excuse me, customer success — and so on. Maybe it’s time I actually blogged about 10gen and MongoDB. 🙂
By the way, our vendor client disclosures are a bit out of date in the area of short-request processing data management. The list is actually 10gen /MongoDB, Cloudera/HBase, CodeFutures/dbShards, Couchbase, DataStax/Cassandra, MarkLogic (yes, I count them, even though I didn’t count them as “NoSQL”), salesforce.com/database.com, and Schooner Information Technology.
10gen company highlights include:
- 10gen boasts a couple hundred paying customers total, but that includes small consulting/training deals.
- 10gen has dozens of MongoDB support subscription customers. That figure was around 25 in August.
- Like similar vendors, 10gen plans to add some proprietary code to its MongoDB support subscription services.
- 10gen is bicoastal, having started in New York City but ramping up in Redwood Shores. For one thing, a lot of 10gen’s customers are in the SF Bay area.
- 10gen headcount was 16 or so in August, 25-30 in January.
For a bit more detail, please see the slides linked above. I shall now do a separate post that is actually about MongoDB.
| Categories: Market share and customer counts, MongoDB | 2 Comments |
Now we know why Vertica has been so weirdly evasive
Communicating with Vertica has been tricky recently. But HP is now announced to be buying Vertica, which pretty much forces me to comment about Vertica. 🙂 So I’ll indulge in a little bit of explanation as to what I know about Vertica, whether for publication or under NDA. My analysis of the HP/Vertica combination, and expectations for same, will go into another post. Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Data warehousing, HP and Neoview, Market share and customer counts, Michael Stonebraker, Vertica Systems | 10 Comments |
Membase and CouchOne merged to form Couchbase
Membase, the company whose product is Membase and whose former company name is Northscale, has merged with CouchOne, the company whose product is CouchDB and whose former name is Couch.io. The result (product and company) will be called Couchbase. CouchDB inventor Damien Katz will join the Membase (now Couchbase) management team as CTO. Couchbase can reasonably be regarded as a document-oriented NoSQL DBMS, a product category I not coincidentally posted about yesterday.
In essence, Couchbase will be CouchDB with scale-out. Alternatively, Couchbase will be Membase with a richer programming interface. The Couchbase sweet spot is likely to be: Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Cache, Couchbase, CouchDB, Market share and customer counts, memcached, NoSQL, Open source, Parallelization, Solid-state memory | 2 Comments |
Cassandra company DataStax (formerly Riptano) is on track
Riptano, the Cassandra company, has changed its name to DataStax. DataStax has opened headquarters in Burlingame and hired some database-experienced folks – notably Ben Werther from Greenplum and Michael Weir from ParAccel, with Zenobia Godschalk (who worked with Aster Data) somewhere in the outside PR mix. Other than that, what’s new at DataStax is pretty much what could have been expected based on what DataStax folks said last spring.
Most notably, DataStax is introducing a software offering, whose full name is DataStax OpsCenter for Apache Cassandra. DataStax OpsCenter for Apache Cassandra seems to be, in essence, a monitoring tool for Cassandra clusters, with a bit of capacity planning bundled in. (If there are any outright operations parts to DataStax OpsCenter, they got overlooked in our conversation.)* Read more
| Categories: Cassandra, DataStax, Market share and customer counts, NoSQL, Specific users, Telecommunications | 1 Comment |
Notes and links October 22, 2010
A number of recent posts have had good comments. This time, I won’t call them out individually.
Evidently Mike Olson of Cloudera is still telling the machine-generated data story, exactly as he should be. The Information Arbitrage/IA Ventures folks said something similar, focusing specifically on “sensor data” …
… and, even better, went on to say: Read more
Vertica-Hadoop integration
DBMS/Hadoop integration is a confusing subject. My post on the Cloudera/Aster Data partnership awaits some clarification in the comment thread. A conversation with Vertica left me unsure about some Hadoop/Vertica Year 2 details as well, although I’m doing better after a follow-up call. On the plus side, we also covered some rather cool Hadoop/Vertica product futures, and those seemed easier to understand. 🙂
I say “Year 2” because Hadoop/Vertica integration has been going on since last year. Indeed, Vertica says that there are now over 25 users of the Hadoop/Vertica combination and hence Vertica’s Hadoop connector. Vertica is now introducing — for immediate GA — a new version of its Hadoop connector. So far as I understood: 
Read more
| Categories: Analytic technologies, Cloudera, EAI, EII, ETL, ELT, ETLT, Hadoop, MapReduce, Market share and customer counts, SQL/Hadoop integration, Text, Vertica Systems | 6 Comments |
Breakthrough: Exadata now has as many reference accounts as Aster Data!
According to Bob Evans of Information Week, there now are 15 disclosed Exadata reference accounts. Coincidentally, there are exactly 15 logos on Aster Data’s customer page. So on its own, that’s not a particularly impressive piece of information.
But other highlights of his column include:
- Some of those accounts are rather big-name. However, I’m not at all sure whether they’re actual production references.
- Andy Mendelsohn characterizes the sweet spot of Exadata’s market as “virtual private cloud.” That matches what Juan Loaiza told me six months ago.
- Oracle claims numerous competitive wins for Exadata. Let me hasten to note that one vendor’s “competitive win” is another vendor’s “our salesman read the deal as an unfavorable one and chose not to compete,” or even sometimes “Huh? We never heard about that deal.” That said, what I’m hearing is that Exadata is indeed a much stronger competitor than it used to be.
- Oracle claims a near $1 billion sales run rate for Exadata. No doubt, a large majority of those are hardware upgrades for existing Oracle database customers, often from non-Sun/Oracle hardware. Even so, some of those are surely deals that would have migrated away from Oracle in the pre-Exadata past.
| Categories: Aster Data, Data warehousing, Exadata, Market share and customer counts, Oracle | 1 Comment |
More on Greenplum and EMC
I talked with Ben Werther of Greenplum for about 40 minutes, which was my first post-merger Greenplum/EMC briefing. “Historical” highlights include:
- Ben says Greenplum wasn’t being shopped, by which he means Greenplum was out raising more capital and the fund-raising was going well. Note: Half or so of Greenplum’s deals were subscription-priced, so it had weaker cash flow than it would have if it were doing equally well selling perpetual licenses.
- However, joint engineering was also going well with, e.g., Greenplum CTO Luke Lonergan spending time at EMC facilities in Cork, Ireland. And one thing led to another …
- Greenplum has ~ 140 customers, vs. ~65 five quarters ago, 100+ at year-end, and an acquisition rate of 12-15/quarter last fall.
- A typical “small” paying customer for Greenplum starts with 10-20 TB of data.
- Greenplum Chorus isn’t generally available yet, with rollout energy being focused on Greenplum 4.0. Note: As important as it is for overall industry direction, Greenplum Chorus is a product which won’t be a terribly big deal in Release 1 anyway.
Highlights looking forward include: Read more
| Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, EMC, Greenplum, Market share and customer counts | 7 Comments |
Riptano, and Cassandra adoption
Tonight’s Cassandra technology post got plenty long enough on its own, so I’m separating out business and adoption issues here. For starters, known Cassandra users include:
- Facebook, which has said it has 150 or so Cassandra nodes (but see below)
- Twitter, which has said it has 45 or so Cassandra nodes
- Rackspace, which used to be Jonathan Ellis’ employer, and now is backing Cassandra company Riptano
- Digg, which along with Twitter and Rackspace was one of the three major users helping advance the Cassandra project
- OpenX, Simple Geo, Digital Reasoning, who Jonathan cited as production users in March
- Cloudkick, as noted and linked in my other post
- Two customers Riptano named at launch (but I’ve forgotten who they were*)
Fetlife, Meebo, and others seem to at least have a healthy interest in Cassandra, based on their level of involvement in a forthcoming Cassandra Summit. That said, the @Fetlife tweetstream features numerous yelps of pain, and I don’t mean the recreational kind. Read more
| Categories: Cassandra, DataStax, Facebook, Market share and customer counts, NoSQL, Open source, Parallelization, Pricing, Specific users | 5 Comments |
Cloudera Enterprise and Hadoop evolution
I talked with Cloudera a couple of weeks ago in connection with the impending release of Cloudera Enterprise. I’d say: Read more