With the ups and downs of the tech business and wide-ranging innovation cycles, market experts are weighing in on the transformation of the database market. And one of those experts is Gary Bloom, CEO at MarkLogic Corp. Bloom recently joined John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at theCUBE Studio in Palo Alto, CA, to discuss the future of database, how MarkLogic is picking up business from Oracle, and the benefit of thinking about what you need your stored data to do years from now.

MarkLogic is an American software business that develops and provides an enterprise NoSQL database, called MarkLogic. In May 2016, MarkLogic previewed MarkLogic 9 and expects to release it in December 2016.

The future of database

The conversation kicked off with an assessment of how the industry has been radically changing, but the incumbents are hanging on, like Oracle, or transforming, like IBM. Furrier asked Bloom about his thoughts on where he thinks the database market is going and where MarkLogic fits into it all.

“We’ve lived off innovation,” said Bloom. “We created a new generation of technology for this big data world before anybody knew there was such a thing as big data.”

He added that having the vision to use modern technologies to build modern applications is extremely critical. “The reason it’s complicated in the database world is we haven’t really seen a transition in about 30 years; that’s when Oracle took over the marketplace from IBM,” he said.

Eating Oracle’s breakfast and looking toward lunch

The point was made by Furrier that Oracle needs to go beyond the database in order to be successful.

Bloom agreed, and said that Oracle is in the “innovator’s dilemma” that IBM was in 30 years ago, and its is essentially creating an environment where they’re going to concede the database market to a new-generation player.

“Right now, MarkLogic is the leader in that category: we’re the biggest, we do the same kinds of operational/transactional systems, except that unlike Oracle, our projects don’t take years to build. We build them in months,” he said.

Bloom explained that over 50 percent of MarkLogic’s current revenue is finishing projects that loyal Oracle customers tried to solve with Oracle first but they could not complete the project.

For IoT, future-proof your strategy

The discussion moved to Furrier asking that if someone is in an IT-buyer frame of mind, what considerations they should keep in mind to decide if a particular vendor is a good fit for them and their needs.

Bloom said to avoid the hype cycles. “For example, all the hype around Hadoop; everyone spent a lot of money on it, and now all the articles suggest that companies didn’t get their value out of it. They put all their data in, but they can’t use it,” he said.

Regarding the hype cycle, Furrier said that it’s mainly around IoT right now, with all of the data from autonomous vehicles, wearables, appliances, etc., being gathered by companies.

Bloom said that he thinks the big challenge for IoT companies is pinning down all of the things in the future that they will want to do with the data. He does believe that most companies have an idea of what they want to do, but it’s still early.

“An advantage of putting it in a product like MarkLogic is we’re a very agile environment. So I don’t have to know today what I will want to do with the data five years from now,” Blook stated. He added that if data is put into a relational database or in many of the open-source databases, the only outcome is meeting today’s requirements.

“Future-proof your strategy,” said Bloom.

Watch the complete video interview below.

Photo by SiliconANGLE