“A move from our licensed database software vendor to an open source postgres database would be a radical move for us”
These are the words of an executive who runs a business critical application on a relational database – one that has reached the limits of its performance and cannot be scaled anymore.
We do not consider the move from a BMW to a Mercedes to be a radical one for us. We do not stick to our existing car because we are familiar with its dashboard. And yet when enterprises think about switching a software vendor, they think it is a radical change
What is more astounding is that we all agreed that the relational database itself was probably not the best solution for their use case. If they were to build the application today, they would start with a document database instead.
We have all heard the saying “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. I experience it regularly when I interact with enterprises. They have the migration tools, the time and incentive to train their staff, and they know it needs to be done at some point. It’s their status-quo culture that stops enterprises from the two biggest levers for cost reduction that the cloud offers
- The option to use managed open source softwares that the hyperscalers provide and get rid of prohibitive software licensing costs on-prem
- Leap-frog the competition by experimenting with different technologies on a pay-as-you-go model on the cloud platform
I empathize with my enterprise customers. But I want to also remind them that there is nothing radical in switching to a different database vendor. In a garage nearby a bunch of 20-somethings are building the next generation document db alternative of their offering as we speak.
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