My analysis of the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud DBMS

Adrian Gonzalez Sanchez
2 min readDec 20, 2021

Original post via LinkedIn (comments contain additional material): https://www.linkedin.com/posts/adriangs86_cloud-dbms-azure-activity-6878640176101437440-hCs-

The Gartner folks released a few days ago the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems. I have used these visuals for a while for discussions with students and executives, and I always insist on the importance of topic knowledge to properly read the insights from the quadrants.

2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Database Management Systems — Source: Gartner, Inc.

☁️ In this case, the “Dec 2021 Cloud DBMS” analysis is a good indicator of the trends and the vendor battle to increase adoption and “capture” data workloads for adopter organizations. It summarizes pretty well what we have seen during the pandemic: Microsoft has gained an incredible momentum, and this is because of their:

1) End-to-end offering 🛍️— They are the masters of the cross-selling. Why not to use Azure, Dynamics, Bonsai, and other MSFT solutions if we can simplify management, data integration, and experimentation.

2) Community strategy 📚 — Free learning and certification opportunities are the key enabler for wider adoption. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has learned the lesson in 2021, and they have released AWS Skill Builder to the general public, as an alternative to MSFT Learning Paths. Oracle is offering free certifications until EOY, and Google’s GCP is continuously working with Coursera to release free learning content.

🌎 Obviously, the increasing level of cloud adoption around the world has helped all these companies develop their activities. Also, security concerns are either a motivation or a stopper for pros to adopt the cloud (think twice… can a “normal” company do better than a big tech?). But the key aspect behind the Cloud DBMS adoption is the willingness to use that data and to create new AI / ML solutions.

For this reason, we will need to wait and check the “2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms”, to see if the big cloud platforms are also dominating the AI/ML space. My prediction: Azure, AWS, and GCP are the leaders (in terms of both market share and technical capabilities), but they won’t be alone. DataRobot, Dataiku, and others are raising the game… and this is good news for all of us.

◣ And you? How do you see the cloud / data / AI trilogy in 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣2️⃣?

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