Enterprise Search: MarkLogic Cheerleader Is Surprised

August 25, 2015

Navigate to this link. You will need a LinkedIn account. Lucky you. Here’s the “comment” about a mid tier consulting firm’s magic whozit. The remark amused me:

It’s crazy to me that MarkLogic is not even on the list. All I can say is Gartner is making a mistake by forgetting it. I’m no expert on targeted marketing or how big the enterprise search market is vs the operational db market. But I know MarkLogic as a company is going after the operational db market instead. Yet almost all our customers deploy search applications. And I work for MarkLogic because after hundreds of ES [enterprise search] projects, MarkLogic was my favorite engine by far to install/use.

Well, crazy is as crazy does. My reaction to this comment is a question, “Isn’t MarkLogic an SGML database?” Even Oracle’s aged alternative can be searched, but the internals are, I hate to say it, a database. Bummer.

However, MarkLogic has some aspects which appear to lure mid tier wizards:

MarkLogic is proprietary NoSQL. I think there are some open source NoSQL alternatives. Gartner’s experts seem to prefer proprietary solutions, not the community goodies.
MarkLogic is getting long in the tooth. The company was founded in 2001, which based on my lousy math, is 14 years ago. Ah, technology does march on with the JSON thing, the Elastic gizmos, and an appetite for continued cash infusions. According to Crunchbase, MarkLogic has sucked in $176.6 million in funding with the most recent infusion coming in May 2015. I heard that a couple of years ago, MarkLogic was in the $6 million range. If that number was close to reality, the company has to get its dancing shoes on and win the international tango competition.
MarkLogic “helped power the US government healthcare.gov site.” I remember reading something about that Web site. Any publicity is good publicity as the saying goes.

Is MarkLogic a unicorn or just another endangered species? Sorry. No answers in Harrod’s Creek. We just use open source software. Works okay. Can’t beat the price either.

Stephen E Arnold, August 25 2015

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Database, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.