Prepare For Change! This Is Not Your Father’s Database Industry

Summary:  Incumbent database vendors aren’t exactly struggling to make ends meet, but the smart ones know that resting on their laurels might get them there someday. That’s because open source technologies like NoSQL and Hadoop are coming after their business.

Open source software is about to blow up the database industry, and Hadoop is the nitroglycerin. This is not a good thing for the legacy software vendors that have built that industry over the past few decades. Facing an ever-mounting attack on their business models, database stalwarts have to hunker down and protect the status quo, or try to ride the open source shockwaves into the next generation of enterprise software.

At a broad scale, the advent of open source software as a legimate option for enterprise workloads has been a long time coming. Linux helped lead the charge during the 1990s and early 2000s, and now there’s open source software everywhere you look, from the operating systems up to the applications. Some large IT shops — including at buttoned-up institutions such as Goldman Sachs — make a product’s open source status a primary consideration in choosing what new technologies to adopt.