Big Data and Analytics market is expected to be huge $125 billion. This is good news for the industry. This implies that CIOs would be siting on big additional budgets to spend. But if you look at some other reports such as the one from CFO.com it tells a different story – the ground reality about CIO budgets. According to this report CIO budgets are growing at a very modest rate. So the key question is how are CIOs going to find money for these new initiatives. Even during the happier times like these when budgets are actually increasing, the gap between requirements and budgets is growing much more than earlier times. If you talk to CIOs they find themselves under more pressure to deliver than when budgets where being cut. Because now they can not explain why they can not support business initiatives when budgets are apparently growing. 

There are ways CIO’s can find budgets for these projects. Cost optimization is a way forward to address these challenges. Cost optimization is a smarter way of utilizing your budgets, finding ways to reduce cost and redeploy the savings in more productive ways. It is evident that need for leveraging cost optimization techniques are very much in demand even when the budgets are growing, from one example that Gartner continues to run consulting offering to help CIOs find budgets through cost optimization. In fact Gartner predicts that “Through 2015, at least 70% of enterprises will have the potential to reduce their I&O costs by 25% or more.”  

One of the ways we help CIOs optimize cost is by helping them redeploy their Database licenses budgets – specially budgets of Oracle database license to open source database subscription. During our 5 years of journey of offering PostgreSQL and MongoDB based solutions we find that for majority of our customer’s key consideration has been unlocking the budgets that are eating huge license and maintenance costs. Through our own experience we find that customers are able to save at least 50% just from maintenance cost of Oracle database even if they move new PostgreSQL subscription. If you compare the cost of new licenses plus maintenance cost of Oracle database over 3 years period then you would find more than 80% saving in PostgreSQL subscription. In a recent report on ‘state of open source RDBMS 2015’ Garter’s calculation shows almost 90% of savings in favour of PostgreSQL subscription from EnterpriseDB. This report is significant in more ways than just cost calculation. It is a great endorsement of growing acceptance of open source RDBMS for business critical applications. In fact you would find EnterpriseDB has been named in the leader’s quadrant into this report. Even MongoDB – which started as a NoSQL database, finds itself mentioned in challenger quadrant amongst RDBMS. It shows the growing maturity of open source databases. In an another recent article in Wired magazine the author says “Open Source Databases Keep Chipping Away at Oracle’s Empire” 

These reports and findings are very reassuring for the CIOs when they are looking for alternative to Oracle database while undertaking the journey of cost optimisation. The growth and strengthening of commercial open source vendors such as EnterpriseDB and MongoDB bring stability to the open source projects. 

There two main areas where customers save from their budget :

 1.Using open source database such as PostgreSQL or MongoDB for new projects instead of using Oracle database and

2. Replacing Oracle database with PostgreSQL database

We have covered theses approaches in detail on our website, please click here  and here to know more.

To conclude I would say that by leveraging the above approaches for cost optimisation, we are helping our customers find budgets for rolling out big data, analytics, IoT kind of new projects.

There are interesting times ahead.