Gartner: Cloud set to take over the database market

By 2022, 75% of all databases will be deployed or migrated to a cloud platform, with only 5% ever considered for repatriation to on-premises, according to Gartner.

This trend will largely be due to databases used for analytics, and the SaaS model.

"According to inquiries with Gartner clients, organisations are developing and deploying new applications in the cloud and moving existing assets at an increasing rate, and we believe this will continue to increase," says Gartner distinguished research vice president Donald Feinberg.

"We also believe this begins with systems for data management solutions for analytics (DMSA) use cases – such as data warehousing, data lakes and other use cases where data is used for analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Increasingly, operational systems are also moving to the cloud, especially with conversion to the SaaS application model.

Gartner research shows that 2018 worldwide database management system (DBMS) revenue grew 18.4% to $46 billion.

Cloud DBMS revenue accounts for 68% of that 18.4% growth – and Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) account for 75.5% of the total market growth.

This trend reinforces that cloud service provider (CSP) infrastructures and the services that run on them are becoming the new data management platform.

Ecosystems are forming around CSPs that both integrate services within a single CSP and provide early steps toward intercloud data management.

This is in distinct contrast to the on-premises approach, where individual products often serve multiple roles but rarely offer their own built-in capabilities to support integration with adjacent products within the on-premises deployment environment.

While there is some growth in on-premises systems, this growth is rarely from new on-premises deployments; it is generally due to price increases and forced upgrades undertaken to avoid risk.

"Ultimately what this shows is that the prominence of the CSP infrastructure, its native offerings, and the third-party offerings that run on them is assured," adds Feinberg.

"A recent Gartner cloud adoption survey showed that of those on the public cloud, 81% were using more than one CSP. The cloud ecosystem is expanding beyond the scope of a single CSP, to multiple CSPs, for most cloud consumers.

This is on top Gartner's announcement that worldwide spending on customer experience and relationship management (CRM) software grew 15.6% to reach $48.2 billion in 2018, according to research from Gartner.

CRM remains both the largest and the fastest growing enterprise application software category.

Worldwide enterprise application software revenue totalled more than $193.6 billion in 2018, a 12.5% increase from 2017 revenue of $172.1 billion – CRM made up almost a quarter of that revenue.