Market Description
Enterprises run on transactions, and this means that transactional databases remain critical for enterprises. The ability to seamlessly scale transactional databases has always been a core challenge for vendors and subsequently for their enterprise users. At the core of critical transactional systems are relational databases, which CxOs must plan to run for at least another decade to come—on-premises and/or in the cloud.
At the same time, offerings must run on a global scale and in multiple clouds, and CxOs will try to consolidate the same or similar solutions across fewer database installations. Next-generation application needs will be addressed in local cloud regions or on-premises, for reasons including data residency, data sovereignty, compliance, and performance requirements. Consolidation delivers consistency, complexity reduction, licensing negotiation upsides, and more—all meaning a lower total cost of ownership (TCO), critical in times of pressure on IT budgets.
With artificial intelligence (AI) being omnipresent since late 2023, database vendors have reacted, with almost all of them providing vector support for their offerings. At the same time, enterprises need to be able to run the workloads of up-and-coming agentic AI applications—often on an infrastructure/platform that cannot scale to the additional performance demands of AI-powered next-generation applications.
