Market Perspectives

Couchbase Is Innovative in Operational Data Platforms Value Index

Written by ISG Software Research | Feb 8, 2023 1:00:00 PM

We are happy to share some insights about Couchbase drawn from our latest Value Index research, which assesses how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements.

We recently published three Ventana Research 2023 Data Platforms Value Indexes, which evaluate technology vendors and products that provide individual and combined analytic and operational data platform support. At Ventana Research, we continue to believe that, for most use cases, there is a clear choice between analytic and operational data platforms to best meet your organization’s needs. We developed three technology assessment and buyers’ guides to focus on overall data platform requirements as well as specific analytic data platform and operational data platform use cases.

In all of our Value Indexes, we utilize a structured research methodology built on evaluation categories designed to reflect real-world criteria and derived from RFP responses and a vendor selection process for analytics and business intelligence. For each of the Value Indexes, we evaluated Couchbase and other vendors in seven categories: five relevant to the product — Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability — and two related to the vendor — TCO/ROI and Validation. To arrive at the Value Index rating for a given vendor, we weighted each category to reflect its relative importance in an RFP process, with the weightings based on our experience and on data derived from our market research, including our Benchmark Research on Analytics and Data.

Couchbase was created in 2011 through the merger of two companies based on the Apache CouchDB document database and the Memcached distributed in-memory caching system. This combination of functionality was integral to Couchbase’s distributed document database architecture and has also been reflected in the company’s culture of fusing together multiple concepts to deliver a flexible and adaptable data platform that can be used to support a variety of data workloads, both on premises and in the cloud. Couchbase offers Couchbase Server for deployment on premises and in the cloud, as well as Couchbase Mobile for edge devices and locations and the Couchbase Capella database-as-a-service (DBaaS) offering. As Couchbase is focused specifically on operational data workloads, it was only included in our Operational Data Platforms Value Index.

Couchbase was categorized as an Innovative Vendor in the Operational Data Platforms Value Index, ranking 10th overall in this Value Index evaluation. It ranked sixth in Product Experience, where it ranked best in the Capability category. It ranked 15th in Customer Experience and ranked best in the Validation category. Its overall performance was impacted by its lower rankings in Usability and TCO/ROI, which represent 15% of the weighting in the overall Value Index.

Our assessment finds that Couchbase could perform better by examining its placement as 11th in Usability, with enhancements to accessibility and intelligence. In Reliability, where it also ranked 11th, it could examine potential improvements related to the management of scalability and performance.

This assessment was based on Couchbase’s data platform products generally available as of September 30, 2022.

Organizations should evaluate their data platform requirements for operational and analytic workloads to ensure the existing products and vendors are meeting their needs. If their current data platforms are not satisfying those requirements, they should consider whether Couchbase can help meet their needs.

This research-based index is the most comprehensive assessment of the value of data platforms in the industry. Technology buyers can learn more about how to use our Value Index by clicking here and included vendors that wish to learn more can click here. Click below to read the individual reports:

Data Platforms Value Index

Analytic Data Platforms Value Index

Operational Data Platforms Value Index