The Future of Database Management System is Cloud

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Gartner published a report that outlines a simple position and thesis:  CLOUD IS NOW THE DEFAULT PLATFORM FOR MANAGING DATA.  They state:

On-premises is the past, and only legacy compatibility or special requirements should keep you there. Here is the evidence:

  1. Gartner numbers show DBMS cloud services are already $10.4 billion of the $46.1 billion DBMS market in 2018. This does not include hosting DBMS licenses in the cloud.
  2. Gartner numbers also show that the overall DBMS Market grew at 18.4% from 2017 to 2018 – its best growth in over a decade. Cloud DBMS accounted for 68% of that growth.
  3. Only two vendors (Amazon Web Services and Microsoft) account for 75% of the growth from 2017 to 2018. AWS is 100% cloud and Microsoft DBMS growth (we believe) was almost 100% cloud. Cloud growth is dramatically changing vendor rankings (See Figure 1 – and notice the vendors in red boxes)
  4. DBMS innovation is cloud-first or cloud-only for development – and often for delivery as well.
  5. A majority of the inquiries to Gartner Data Management analysts about DBMS choices are about cloud platforms and migration to these platforms.
Figure 1 Total DBMS Market Share Ranks 2011 2018 by revenue

<Higher resolution is available HERE>

What does this mean to the IT community?

  1. It confirms that more and more end-user organizations are deploying systems and applications to the cloud, including replacing on-premises systems with SaaS. IT may or may not be driving these shifts.
  2. Organizations who want to take advantage of new innovation in DBMS are moving to the cloud. It is happening only there, or at the least, in the cloud first. However, there is an increasing amount of innovation that will never get to on-premises, even when the vendor has on-premises products.
  3. New pricing models, avoidance of capital expense in favor of operating expense, and leveraging a pay-as-you-go approach, seem to be driving the move to the cloud.


The message in the research is simple – on-premises is the new legacy. Cloud is the future.  All organizations, big and small, will be using the cloud in increasing amounts. While it is still possible and probable that larger organizations will maintain on-premises systems, increasingly these will be hybrid in nature, supporting both cloud and on-premises.

But you have millions – even billions – wrapped up in this legacy that is consuming a large part of your budget.  Even as you move workloads to the cloud, these ‘old legacy’ systems keep running.

For instance, you moved to Salesforce and Workday and the older Siebel and Peoplesoft instances keep running because everything didn’t get migrated -> only what had to be moved is now in the cloud.  Why not retire those old systems into a repository that allows the business logic, data relationships and reporting to persist and save 10x money?

Platform 3 Solutions

That is where Platform 3 Solutions, with their expertise and Archon product can help you retire the old so you can focus on the new.

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