Over the last few years, NoSQL database technology has experienced explosive growth and increased use by large enterprises for their mission critical applications.
What’s remarkable is the variety of organisations and industries making the shift to this disruptive technology and reaping the reward.
Eight to 10 years ago, when NoSQL pioneers first deployed the technology, its use was limited to Internet-age companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and LinkedIn.
But today enterprises across virtually every industry are deploying NoSQL. But why now? What’s the use?
Beyond experimentation
NoSQL adoption has clearly moved beyond experimenters and innovators to mainstream “early adopters” for mission critical applications.
While it’s still early days in the NoSQL adoption cycle, enterprises are using NoSQL for mission critical applications that drive revenue and serve massive numbers of users.
In fact, major enterprises are deploying NoSQL for customer-facing, revenue-driving applications that serve hundreds of millions of consumers, business customers, and citizens.
They’re turning to NoSQL to overcome limitations of decades-old relational database technology, and they’re choosing open source NoSQL over proprietary relational products from providers like Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft – in many cases, replacing those databases with NoSQL – at a fraction of the cost.
Every industry
NoSQL adoption is being driven by both industry trends and business objectives.
Major trends, for example the proliferation of mobile devices, the Internet of Things, big data, and cloud infrastructure, are raising the scalability and performance requirements for enterprise web and mobile applications, as the number of users, user expectations, and user interactions continue to grow.
>See also: Top 8 trends for big data in 2016
As a result, NoSQL adopters represent a very broad range of industries, from retail and financial services to travel, telecommunications, and government.
Enterprises that need to develop and deploy large-scale enterprise web, mobile, and IoT applications – which includes pretty much every industry – are turning to NoSQL as a key part of the solution.
Measurable benefits
NoSQL is enabling enterprises to increase business agility, achieve a faster time to market, and operate at a global scale while reducing costs.
In addition, enterprises are modernising database infrastructure by implementing database as a service (DBaaS) to meet the requirements of individual business units with and without multi-tenant cloud infrastructure, public or private, to improve resource and operational efficiency.
Enterprises are reporting major, quantifiable benefits from their use of NoSQL.
Most importantly, they’re solving problems that traditional relational databases cannot address.
>See also: Dominance, disruption and cognitive dissonance: the analytics landscape
Among other benefits, NoSQL is enabling enterprises to deliver more responsive applications; scale their applications more affordably; increase resource efficiency; develop applications more quickly; and harness the value of big data to better understand customers and improve their business.
A fundamental cornerstone
Along with other big data technologies such as Hadoop, NoSQL has become a fundamental cornerstone of modern, big data infrastructure.
We are already seeing a number of forward-looking enterprises – those known for their early use of emerging technologies – begin to “re-platform” their technology infrastructure with NoSQL to build a new foundation that meets big data requirements.
Over the next several years, we expect to see this broad re-platforming take off in a big way.
With its ability to support everything from personalisation and real time big data to cataloguing and digital communications, NoSQL has clearly caught the interest and imagination of both developers and business managers alike.
NoSQL solves the key challenges of modern businesses (for example scalability) that relational database technology simply was never designed to, and cannot ever, address.
Sourced by Luke Whitehead, head of European marketing, Couchbase
