[xquery-talk] the market of XQuery

[daniela florescu]

XQuery is supposed to solve the problem of processing XML data.

So far so good.

I claim that the market for XML processing RIGHT NOW is not that big.
But it has chances to grow…. 

But first let;s define what I call “market". There are several factors that influence
a “market":
(A) the volume of users who need the product
(B)  the acute-ness of the need (do they need it really badly, or a little)
(C) how much money the customers themselves have — the last two will influence the price
(D) how repeatable/consistent is the need
(E)  the availability of the products that solve the need.

For an “ideal" market for a product, ideally you need the first four to be big, and the fifth to be low.

============

Now there are some distinct areas where XML processing is needed. Let’s look at each one of them 
and the factors above for XQuery.

Also, there is also a matter of timing, aka, wether the market is “mature” enough or not, or maybe there
is potential for growth of the market in the future, even if market low right now.

(1) XML as documents.
====================

(A) low to medium
(B) high
(C) low
(D) high
(E) high (XSLT does a better job then XQuery at this, and there are plenty of good open source XSLT processors).

Overall score: not good.

Maturity of the market: high. Not likely that from now on, the market will explode. Will probably grow, but linearly.


(2) XML as data
==============

"XML as data" is mostly used to send XML messages from system to system. (XBRL, HL7, etc).

Note: sending messages in those formats COULD NOT have happen until there were standardized SCHEMAS in those verticals. 
Most of those verticals JUST standardized XML schemas and hence, probably we’ll see this fragment growing fast after
that.

(A) low right now, but growing fast
(B) low
(C) high
(D) high
(E) low

Overall score: not good now, but very good changes that this will grow fast quickly, as fast as XBRL, HL7, etc, will start being used
large scale.

Maturity of the market: low now, but likely to explode in the future.

That would explain why you didn’t see XQuery being used until now in that sector.

The company that is most likely to take over this market: SPLUNK.

(and later on, when they’ll figure out that they need Big Data ALSO for XML: Spark, Hadoop, etc)

(3) XQuery as an integration/orchestration language between systems on the Web
===============================================================

That would be one of the main usages of XQuery.

(A) high
(B) high
(C) high
(D) very low
(E) low

Overall score: good one. 

This COULD be one of the first growth areas for XML and XQuery.

However, data integration is more a problem of services rather then licenses, and hence it’s  hard to make 
money out of it. (There is a good old saying: “once you’ve seen a data integration problem, well, you seen
only ONE data integration problem”. It’s not a repeatable process most of the time… hence the services..
hence not repeatable revenue…. 

…. hence not good margins.

Well, only a company with a very good strategy can make a business success in this area.

The companies that are most likely to take over in this area: Informatica, Mulesoft, etc.

However, in this economical conjecture, it’s very likely that in order to avoid the competition, they’ll avoid standards and
use some proprietary concoctions of their own.

===========================

That’s my 5 cents analysis of where the XQuery market is right now.

If we start talking about JSON, that’s a whole new problem. I think the market of JSON
data processing is much bigger, and growing much faster.

Best
Dana