COVID Impacts, Multi-Cloud, and Database Consolidation

By Franz Aman, CMO at MariaDB Corporation

Given the massive changes that 2020 brought to the tech industry and world in general, I'm hoping that 2021 will be much less unpredictable. At a high level, the positives that have come out of this year - such as the resilience and resourcefulness that businesses and their employees have shown - will be the foundation for a stronger year from a business perspective, leading to a new era of growth.

COVID's impact on IT

This year has challenged every company in the world one way or the other. Companies that had already migrated to the cloud had an easier time transitioning and competing in the pandemic economy. COVID's impact has sped that trend up significantly, with 40% of IT leaders in a recent survey admitting they are accelerating their move to the cloud in order to keep up with changing times. I expect this acceleration to continue in 2021 because the cloud's intrinsic benefits - such as a more flexible investment model, reduced infrastructure and personnel costs and its easily scalable nature - have never been more powerful. While we will all be thrilled to put 2020 behind us, many IT challenges will remain, and the cloud's role in overcoming them will only continue to grow.

Multi-cloud moves to the forefront

While we expect to see an accelerated use of cloud databases as more applications move to the cloud, we also expect to see a dramatic shift toward multi-cloud support becoming a requirement in 2021. The key is giving companies the ability to source cloud services from more than one big player to gain leverage and insulation from the large-scale outages we have seen.

Database consolidation

360. That's the number of database systems out in the wild. And while choice is good and finding the right tool for the job is smart, it also adds major complexity. As companies move to modernize in the cloud, they will seek simplification, which will lead to massive consolidation in the database market. Database vendors that offer multi-functional capabilities will win, rather than a multitude of niche databases that need to be stitched together and require different ways of accessing data.

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About the Author

Franz Aman is the CMO at MariaDB Corporation, and brings more than 25 years of experience in leadership and innovation across marketing, including global product marketing, product management, strategy, brand and communications. Franz holds a degree in geophysics from Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, Germany. He has held numerous executive positions within industry-leading technology companies, including Informatica, SAP, BusinessObjects, BEA Systems, SGI and Sun Microsystems.