Gartner has published its DBMS market revenue number estimates for 2023, the culmination of a huge annual effort across all software categories. You can find Robin Schumacher’s report at https://lnkd.in/gj_mN4Y2 (clients only) and as usual, there are numerous interesting changes.
DBMS revenue crossed a major milestone –
it is now a $100B market.
Gartner substantially restated its estimated prior year revenue for numerous vendors. This is not unusual and reflects ongoing dialogue with the vendors themselves about how their revenues are classified across product categories, but this year seemed more volatile than usual.
One thing that did not change was growth – total revenue grew 13.3%, just behind last years’ 13.6%. Seven of the Top Ten vendors grew at or above the market rate, and three – Oracle, IBM and SAP – grew slower than the market, a pattern that has been true for several years.
Hyperscalers Extend Dominance
At the top, some hyperscalers pulled further away, sustaining double-digit growth off their huge bases.
- Gartner’s AWS revenue number for 2022 was raised $984M. AWS’ $27.2B for 2023 increased their lead over Microsoft to over $2.2B (Microsoft’s 2023 revenue was $25B), but they grew at similar rates, 13.3% and 13.6%, respectively. Amazon’s growth dropped from 24.7% in 2022 – Microsoft’s only dropped .2%. It will be interesting to see if this presages a new pattern for 2024. Note the effect of the prior year changes – they “shrank” AWS’ growth, but Microsoft’s 2022 number was unchanged, so had no directional impact.
- Oracle’s revenue number for 2022 was dropped $649M. Even based on that restated number, they grew well below the market rate at 4.5% in 2023 – without the change they would have appeared nearly flat. The restatement made their growth seem larger. The only hyperscaler with DBMS revenue growing in single digits, they are falling further behind Microsoft – they now lag by $7.3B, and the gap continues to widen. Nonetheless, for perspective, Oracle’s dollar growth of $764M is larger than the total revenue of any vendor below the top 14.
- Google is now over $10B for the first time. Their number for 2022 was dropped $34M, a small restatement. Their growth – to $10.1B – dropped to “only” 32.2% (from 46.2% the prior year) – a rate still more than double the top two, and they continue to steadily close the gap on the top 3. They remain $7.5B behind Oracle, and continue their string of leading percentage growth among the top 4. For perspective, though, note that both AWS and Microsoft grew more in dollars.
Legacy Leaders Lag
IBM’s number for 2022 was dropped $375M. Thus, it appears that they grew $12M (0.3%) to this year’s $4.2B. IBM’s ten year string of diminishing DBMS revenues may well have ended in 2023 – perhaps 2024 will clarify that.
SAP’s number for 2022 was dropped $130M. As a result, their growth also looks better, although it was only 5.3%, and they gained a bit on IBM (they are now separated by $419M.)
Snowflake and MongoDB Move Up – Again
Snowflake passed Alibaba – and is now number 7 at $2.2B. Their revenue number for 2022 was raised $240.2M, and they still grew 52.6%. Snowflake’s DBMS revenue growth rate is the highest among the top ten, and if sustained would move them to 5th place within 3 years.
Alibaba Cloud’s number for 2022 was dropped $198.2M. They grew at a strong 18.5% to $2.06B in 2023. Alibaba is now the eighth member of the $2B and up club.
MongoDB’s number for 2022 was raised $17M, a relatively insignificant change compared to their excellent growth of 32.4% to $1.595B. Only Snowflake grew faster in percentage terms among the top ten, on a larger base. Still, for perspective, Google’s DBMS revenue growth in dollars was greater than MongoDB’s total DBMS revenue. The gap to hyperscaler numbers remains huge – and growing. MongoDB remains in 9th place, pulling away from Huawei, just behind Alibaba and growing much faster.
Huawei’s number for 2022 was raised $75M, and their revenue grew to $1.44B, a rate of 15.1%. They will have to continue this to hold off Tencent, who is breathing down their necks – but we’ll discuss that in the next post, about the Second Ten.
If you’d like to see a great visual map of the market, check out Gartner analyst Adam Ronthal’s spaghetti chart at
Conclusions and Predictions
It’s clear that the biggest trend – ever-increasing dominance by the cloud platform providers – continues to define the DBMS market rankings. The competitive success of Google, from their first billion dollar year in 2019 to $10B five years later, continues to impress. And the rise of Snowflake and MongoDB, though inevitably cooling in percentage terms, demonstrates that it is still possible to succeed as an ISV. Both should move up in the next few years to overtake IBM and SAP unless dramatic changes occur in the market.
