Re: recent Gartner's publication

On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 09:42:06AM +0200, Gabriele Bartolini wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
>   Do you think it could be possible/worth for the Community to take a step
> forward in order to have "PostgreSQL" in Gartner's magic quadrant?

Yes, I wanted to address that, but not in my "corrections" email.

I think there are a few factors. Here is a list:

* I am glad the inaccuracies were inside the EnterpriseDB section, and
not at the top of the article, where they usually are.

* There is some text that explains that their ranking evaluates all the
products of a company as a whole, meaning they probably don't even think
of Postgres as an offering that is separate from EnterpriseDB --- they
are just not set up to evaluate things in that way.

* I think they are used to studying open source/commercial hybrids in
the MySQL/MongoDB/Ingres model, where the company controls the
development. They do understand our setup based on their comments, but
they are seeing it as a modified MySQL/MongoDB/Ingres model, not as a
totally new one, more similar to RedHat.

* They are not used to open source offerings as being a stand-alone
useful product, e.g. Linux is a kernel, not a deployable solution ---
you need a packager like Debian or RedHat. In fact, EDB is like RedHat
in that they contribute to an open source project with many other
companies as peers, but they are different in that the open source
project itself is a deployable option, which the Linux kernel is not.
This subtlety is often not well understood.

* Gartner focuses on whole-solution offerings, e.g training, support,
which the community does not have as a commercial offering. We have
free support, but no SLA, for example.

* In my opinion, they are focused on money-making enterprises, which
the community is not.

In summary, I would love to see a Postgres category on there, and would
love to see Postgres as a pin on that chart, but it seems like a
difficult goal unless their approach to open source dramatically
changes.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

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