Billion Dollar Unicorns: MarkLogic Making Waves in Enterprise NoSQL

One of the last things that a CIO wants to change in their organization is the database that they deploy. That is one reason why most companies are still using relational databases and haven’t switched to the relatively new NoSQL versions. A 2014 State of Database Technology Survey found that the biggest pie of the database market was still held by Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle. But that is slowly changing as companies like Billion Dollar Unicorn club entrant MarkLogic improve their offerings.

MarkLogic’s Offerings

MarkLogic was founded in 2001 by Paul Pedersen, Frank R. Caufield, and Christopher Lindblad. Christopher was a computer scientist who had been working for Infoseek and was trying to build a search engine for corporate data. The trio set up MarkLogic with the focus on building a database and application system that would enable organizations to not only capture more data, but to also perform more activities with it. Their enterprise NoSQL database is a new generation database that has been built on a flexible data model to help store, manage, and search Big Data while providing for data resiliency and consistency.

Unlike traditional, relational databases, NoSQL databases are better capable of handling the troves of unstructured data that are being created especially on account of the rise of social networks. Relational databases are written in rows and columns and are not entirely capable of managing the dynamic nature of new data or integrating heterogeneous data forms that are present in organizations today. NoSQL databases have been able to address those issues. MarkLogic has taken the NoSQL databases to an enterprise level capability by adding features such as data reliability, transactional consistency, security, and availability. They are already seeing organizations adapt to NoSQL as nearly 80% of their customers are those who are migrating from Oracle databases.

MarkLogic has nearly 550 customers including several big names such as The Federal Aviation Administration, Conde Nast, CQ Roll Call, BBC, and Citi, to name a few.

MarkLogic’s Financials

MarkLogic earns revenues through a license fee charged to their customers. They offer a free developer version that comes with features such as Native JSON and XML Database, integrated Full-text search engine, ACID transactions, certified security, and Hadoop integration. Additional enterprise level options are available at prices ranging from $0.99 per hour to $18,000 per year. Enterprise grade offerings come with additional features such as language packs, tiered storage, and geospatial capabilities. Their detailed financials are not known, but analysts estimate that they were trending at $100 million in revenues for the year ended December 2014. Revenues are estimated to have grown 50% over the year.

MarkLogic has been venture funded so far with $175.6 million raised from investors including Wellington Management, Arrowpoint Partners, Gary Bloom, Northgate Capital, Sequoia Capital, Tenaya Capital, and Lehman Brothers. Their last round of funding was held in May this year when they raised $102 million in a round led by Wellington Management at a valuation of over $1 billion. MarkLogic plans to use the latest funds for market expansion and research and development efforts. Analysts expect that MarkLogic is now gearing up for an IPO.

More investigation and analysis of Unicorn companies can be found in my latest Entrepreneur Journeys book, Billion Dollar Unicorns. The term Unicorn was coined in a TechCrunch article by Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures.

Looking For More Hands-On Advice?

I receive many emails from entrepreneurs who want to discuss their specific businesses. I’m very happy to discuss your situation during my free online 1M/1M Roundtables, held almost every Thursday. During each roundtable, up to five entrepreneurs can pitch their businesses and receive my immediate and straightforward feedback.

To give entrepreneurs all over the world access to Silicon Valley’s knowledge, methodology, and network, I founded the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) global virtual incubator. 1M/1M aims to nurture a million entrepreneurs to reach a million dollars each in annual revenue and beyond, thereby creating a trillion dollars in global GDP and ten million jobs.

For those still testing the waters of entrepreneurship, I’ve written my Entrepreneur Journeys book series to inform and inspire. My newest book, Billion Dollar Unicorns, is now available from Amazon.

If you are interested in entrepreneurship topics and my writings, you can follow me here. I hope to publish articles on LinkedIn every week.

Photo credit: Long Zheng/Flickr.com.