Acceleration Economy Analyst Perspectives are designed to help executives garner a better understanding of the business implications presented by a vendor, technology, or market.
I recently had the opportunity to catch up with Couchbase, a leading Modern Database vendor and one of the participants in Cloud Database Battleground event.
Note: I’ll be leading sessions and facilitating collaboration for CXOs during Cloud Wars Expo happening June 28-30 where you can reimagine business models driven by data insights.
What is a ‘Modern Database’ Vendor and Why Does It Matter?
Legacy database vendors have been around since the 1980s. Their products were designed for installation on customers’ servers and are primarily based on the Relational Database model and the SQL database language. Legacy databases have lengthy track records and support huge, mission-critical workloads across industries. But while they have evolved, their evolution has been slowed by the need to support hordes of long-time customers.
Modern Database vendors are 21st-century firms whose products are designed to run in the cloud, and either extend the Relational model and SQL language or implement a different model (generically called ‘NoSQL’) designed to overcome one or more perceived limitations of the Relational model. They are generally much smaller than Legacy database vendors—although some have impressive market caps and VC investments—and have less experience supporting enterprise customers.
What is Couchbase?
Couchbase was formed in 2011 by the merger of Membase (a fast distributed object store) and CouchOne (a document database infrastructure). Over the ensuing decade, they combined the strengths of each product and added new features to create a fast, distributed, lightweight Relational + NoSQL environment for building modern applications—in the cloud, on-prem, and on mobile devices.
According to Couchbase, they combine the flexibility and cost-performance of NoSQL with the ‘trusted strengths’ of Relational databases, as well as supporting both transactional and analytics workloads in one product (‘Capella’ packaged as a managed cloud Database and ‘Couchbase Server’ packaged as a downloadable product).
Customers can also install ‘Couchbase Mobile’—a compatible and integrated ‘Lite’ version of Server—on mobile devices to create a seamless data environment that scales from IoT devices all the way up to the enterprise data repository.
The Couchbase promise of “Fast, Familiar, Flexible, Future-Proof, Affordable” should resonate with CIOs and business executives who need to develop and support complex data-intensive applications without the burdens of:
- Hosting and managing databases yourself (although you can host if you want)
- Maintaining multiple database types and learning multiple languages
- Building or buying separate tools to integrate mobile and corporate data
As a CIO whose team developed a ‘casually connected’ mobile transaction-processing, data-intensive application 15+ years ago, I was impressed by how much faster we could have delivered value and how much simpler the maintenance would have been with Couchbase. And as a CIO who’s had to support—i.e., pay for—a plethora of database tools to meet various business goals, I was impressed by how much simpler a Couchbase environment could be.
It’s easy to envision the seamless ‘database Nirvana’ a vendor like Couchbase promises. And if you start from scratch, it appears quite easy to achieve, especially if you use Capella and let Couchbase provide you with a ‘Database-as-a Service.’ Getting there, if you’re like most traditional firms—with a hodgepodge of applications, databases, and tools implemented over decades—is non-trivial. That’s not Couchbase’s fault, but it’s your CIO’s reality.
The Couchbase website is loaded with technical information to help your IT team learn the Couchbase tools, and the availability of SQL for queries, eases the transition for application developers and DBAs, but business execs shouldn’t underestimate the work and time involved in making a ‘Legacy to Modern’ leap at established firms.
CxO Bottom-line:
Couchbase provides a powerful, flexible, scalable database environment that can save time and money while simplifying complex IT environments. It’s a small company in a big business segment so you must be comfortable entrusting critical technology to a smaller vendor. As a CIO, I’d be comfortable doing a ‘proof-of-concept’ project to deliver quick value, trusting I could use Couchbase for bigger projects without outgrowing it.
Want to gain more insights from Cloud Wars Expo?
Starting on July 20th, more than 40 hours of on-demand cloud education content will be available for free to Acceleration Economy Subscribers.
