5 Things I Learned at the MarkLogic User Conference

This was the first MarkLogic conference I’ve been to, and I’ve been developing with MarkLogic for less than a year. So this really was a good opportunity for me to learn more about the company, the industry, other customers, and the future of the technology.

I also got to present a session at the conference with Justin Makeig from MarkLogic and Mindie Sorenson from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on how MarkLogic is a database, an app server, and a search engine rolled into one, and that web development using XQuery and MarkLogic yielded some great productivity gains. I learned a lot from Justin and Minidie and I thought our presentation gave some much needed information to customers thinking about developing web apps with XQuery.

Reflecting back on the conference, this is what I learned:

1. MarkLogic is a disruptive technology. The single best presentation for me at the conference was Dave Kellog’s presentation (slides here) and he discussed this very clearly. MarkLogic is a disruptive technology so expect it to be disruptive. It doesn’t fit into any existing category of server or database, and it causes infrastructure changes which can be scary for some people and can evoke some strong feelings. And it’s really nice to see the CEO understanding this perhaps better than anyone else.

2. Unstructured and semi-structured data is where MarkLogic shines. The CEO just recently wrote a blog post on this. Usually when people think of data they think of structured data, but actually the majority of data that any organization is likely to have is semi-structured, which could either be semi-structured in terms of an undefined schema or the fact that the schema changes so often. Embracing semi-structured data and not necessarily trying to change it to structured data is quite a change in thinking, but a real opportunities exist for being able to query and manipulate this type of data.

3. There are two main categories of MarkLogic users: large data set, and multi-channel publishers. From my observation, some customers seemed to gain value from the fact MarkLogic can take in massive amounts of semi-structured data and produce meaningful results in fractions of a second, while others gain value from being able to take their data and easily publish it out to different channels in different forms with little effort. The federal customers seem to lean more towards the former and the publishers more towards the latter, although the divisions are not sharp. So some features really appeal to some customers and others not based on what they use MarkLogic for. MarkLogic has to worry about growing a business, not just about the technology. I might have my ideas about where the technology should go, but I don’t have to worry about revenue streams like MarkLogic has to.

4. Tablet devices will become an important channel for content interaction. I think there is an evolution in the industry which starts with using MarkLogic as a database to handle large sets of unstructured data, then goes to writing useful applications to interact and manipulate that data, and then goes to creating data visualizations and high fidelity user interactions with the data. I think the value of MarkLogic as a database has been realized and most customers are using MarkLogic as such. I think the industry has started to grow in the area of writing XQuery applications to really be able to explore and manipulate their data. But really I think the future will be less about “applications” and more about “interactions.”

Chris Lindblad, who is the Chief Architect and founder of MarkLogic, said at the conference something about how he liked the iPad because it melted the computer away so that it was just the user interacting with his data. That really struck me, and after reflecting on this for awhile, I decided that this is also a place I want to be, so I went and got a Macbook and an iPad and I am going to gain skills as an iPad developer. But I think the data visualization and elegant user interactions will only come after the XQuery web app industry has matured. So we have some time, but I want to be able to create high fidelity iPad-like interactions when the time comes, and not have to play catch-up.

5. The employees and customers of MarkLogic are some of the best I’ve ever seen. I saw very professional, very skilled people at the conference, both employees and customers. This is a very good sign of the health of the industry, and a very good foundation for future growth. All the smart kids are doing it (well, not all of them…yet). It’s all quality, all around.