NoSQL database maker MongoDB and big data platform provider MapR Technologies this week were named leaders in the big data NoSQL space in a Forrester Research study.
In the research firm’s report, “The Forrester Wave: Big Data NoSQL, Q3 2016,” by analyst Noel Yuhanna, MongoDB received the highest scores possible in 19 of the 26 criteria evaluated, including big data support, performance, scalability, tools, workloads, ability to execute and road map.
NoSQL technology offers enterprises flexibility as NoSQL data stores can support structured, unstructured and semi-structured data for different types of business applications.
The Forrester report cited MongoDB as the most popular NoSQL database. The open-source database is “popular among developers because it is easy to use, scales to meet the most demanding applications and offers the most comprehensive ecosystem of tools and partners,” the report said.
MongoDB boasts more than 2,000 paying customers using its open-source database, including companies such as AXA, Barclays, Comcast, DHL, Expedia, Sprinklr, UPS i-parcel, The Washington Post and x.ai.
“UPS i-parcel must provide immediate and accurate cross-border shipping costs, as this is a critical factor in consumers’ online purchase decision,” Yursil Kidwai, vice president of technology at UPS i-parcel, said in a statement. “We help our retail customers grow their business globally while relying on us to manage the complexity of shipping, customs duties, multiple languages and currency conversion. MongoDB provides a flexible platform that helps us meet our customers’ requirements for real-time transaction data to enable higher shopping cart conversion rates.”
The Forrester report noted that common use cases for MongoDB include personalization, real-time analytics, internet of things (IoT), product and asset catalogs, security and fraud, mobile applications, content management, and social and collaboration applications.
Dev Ittycheria, president and CEO of MongoDB, said the company’s strategy is to make MongoDB the clear choice for a wide variety of use cases and the most mission-critical workloads.
“It’s always gratifying to see our strategy recognized by big analyst reports, but the true benchmark for us is how many developers and organizations are adopting MongoDB’s products and services, including MongoDB Atlas, our new database as a service,” Ittycheria said in a statement.
Announced at the MongoDB World conference in June, Atlas is an elastic, on-demand cloud service that includes all necessary infrastructure and turnkey management of the MongoDB database for users. The service will be available initially on Amazon Web Services, followed by Microsoft Azure and then Google Cloud Platform.
“MongoDB Atlas takes everything we know about operating MongoDB and packages it into a convenient, secure, elastic, on-demand service,” Ittycheria said. “This new offering is yet another major milestone for the most feature-rich and popular database for modern applications, and expands the options for how customers can consume the technology—in their own data centers, in the cloud, and now as a service.”
As the new service is built and operated by the engineers who build and maintain MongoDB, developers can be assured that all aspects of the offering, such as provisioning, configuration, patching, upgrades, backups, failure recovery and more, will be handled efficiently.
Also in the Forrester report, Yuhanna noted that the MapR-DB NoSQL database that is part of the MapR Converged Data Platform “is running NoSQL operations, Hadoop analytics, and event stream processing in the same cluster.” It also features web-scale storage, event streaming and ANSI SQL querying.
Yuhanna said customers like the MapR offering for “its ability to support petabyte scalability, integration with Hadoop, data consistency, multimaster replication and responsive data access.” Moreover, use cases for MapR-DB include fraud detection, social networking, gaming, big data analytics, mobile, IoT and providing a 360-degree view of a customer, the report said.
“Our converged data platform helps customers to lower IT costs by unifying data into a single platform while building new innovative applications to generate new revenue streams,” Jack Norris, senior vice president of data and applications at MapR, said in a statement.
Earlier this month, MapR secured $50 million in new equity financing. The financing was led by Future Fund, with participation from all existing investors, including Google Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, New Enterprise Associates, Qualcomm Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. With this new round of financing, MapR has raised a total of $194 million in equity to date.
Meanwhile, the Forrester report also cited Amazon DynamoDB as the most popular NoSQL cloud database. It also noted that Couchbase offers a viable open-source NoSQL DBMS to support broad use cases, and cited Neo Technology’s Neo4j as the most popular graph database.