Great technology, but company missed its market and dying slowly
Pros
Originally based on innovative Internet search engine technology, MarkLogic offers a mature and capable data platform with scalability and performance that can replace mainframe, Oracle, and other enterprise database incumbents. Engineering culture is strong, as is the commitment of customer-facing employees. ML is deeply embedded in a number of Wall Street Firms, the Centers for Medicaid Services, and some intelligence agencies, who were early adopters. The company offers competitive pay and benefits, but successive rounds of massive layoffs have cast a pall of fear that customers can smell.
Cons
MarkLogic is very expensive and difficult to use, although in the last several years it has become better adapted to popular development APIs and modern database tooling. Senior leadership tried to build the company into a new Oracle, and in so doing, failed to evolve beyond the traditional, on-premise, perpetual license business model in time to exploit its market opportunity. Competitors like MongoDB, seeded the market with a free and open source community edition and eventually closed the gap on security and enterprise features and grew their paid installed base very quickly. Growing out of the lack of any customer or partner developers to develop on the esoteric ML platform, the company used its consulting services to lead customer adoption but soon became reliant on services revenue to ease the pain of revenue valleys in between its large deals. The consulting services grew powerful and did everything it could to slow the growth of a partner ecosystem and charging astronomical rates for for permanently-deployed consultants, leading endless IT projects. Services revenue grew, as installed base growth stalled and eventually began to shrink. Five years ago, the revenue was evenly split between software license and services, and by now, I'd guess it's about 20/80, software-to-services, when it should be the other way around and right where MongoDB is.
