Mark Logic Wants to Play with X-Hive?

Dave Kellogg, the CEO at Mark Logic posted a response to my X-Hive and the Content Server post. His basic theme, is that Mark Logic is not the enemy of EMC. Maybe, maybe not. Personally, I don’t care as long as my clients are happy. I do want to comment briefly on it so as to clarify things as I understand them. Any EMC person that wants to add clarification, please do so for everyone’s benefit.

We have many common customers. They want the products to work together.

Is this Mark Logic with X-Hive or Documentum Content Server?

MarkLogic Server complements document management — we deliberately decided not to build a CMS precisely to avoid competing with ECM vendors. (Ironically, x-Hive built a competing CMS called Docato on top of x-Hive/DB.)

I’m not sure how this changes things. They complement the Documentum Content Server. So does X-Hive. The won’t compete with Content Server. It is the competition with X-Hive, the Documentum XML Store, that the competition centers upon.

Mark Logic is about doing one thing better than anyone in the world: high-performance XQuery on top of large XML document stores. I don’t believe that’s the mission statement for x-Hive/DB (now “EMC Documentum XML Store”) which I’d guess is more of “how can we get Oracle out from underneath all our implementations?”

MarkLogic is more than just a basic “store.” First, MarkLogic is a high-end product — it goes very fast and scales to contentbases in the hundreds of terabytes. Second, MarkLogic provides a new top-to-bottom XML way of building web applications.

When attending the X-Hive presentations, they claim to do what Mark Logic does, except better. This is usually where the impression of Mark Logic as the main competition, aka “the enemy”, crops up. I do want to point out that this comes from X-Hive acquired people, not from any of the acquirers.

I think the point that I have taken away is that X-Hive and Mark Logic compete, but Mark Logic can work with the Content Server. Personally, I’d be happy if I was Dave. They compete with X-Hive, but the EMC sales people may try and sell customers more that just the X-Hive product, making things easier for Mark’s people. Also, they have a fair shot of staying ahead of the performance curve as X-Hive is spending resources becoming part of the Documentum platform.

2 thoughts on “Mark Logic Wants to Play with X-Hive?”

  1. Remon says:

    I’m an X-Hive employee, so I feel qualified to make a couple of remarks.

    First of all, we don’t think of Mark Logic as the enemy. In fact, we hardly think of Mark Logic at all. We’re too busy building good software.

    I report directly to Jeroen van Rotterdam, who you mentioned gave the presentation, so I know him fairly well. I asked him about this “enemy” story, and he said he hardly ever mentions Mark Logic.

    This matches my personal experience. I have only once heard him talk about Mark Logic, and that was during the time that EMC was contemplating buying X-Hive. The other company they had in mind was… Mark Logic!

    At the time of the acquisition (early to mid last year), EMC did a very detailed and thorough analysis of the two products and companies. They found that X-Hive/DB was faster on many benchmark tests, while Mark Logic was faster on only a couple of tests, most notably on some full text search test. (But we’ll address that shortly, see below 😉 So for Mark Logic to be “staying ahead of the performance curve” would mean they first have to *get* ahead.

    Now that X-Hive is part of the EMC family, we’re getting the resources that a big company can afford. So, even though we obviously need to spend resources on integrating X-Hive/DB into Documentum, we’re actually more than compensating for that by expanding the DB team. So if I were Dave, I wouldn’t be happy at all 😉

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  2. Thanks for the information Remon. I will state that Jeroen never called Mark Logic the “enemy”, but in the course of 3-4 hours, he referred to Mark Logic 2-3 times for a comparison basis, so I’ll stick to my analogy.

    Thanks for the other information. I had hearsay on performance, but with no direct experience or written metrics, I didn’t want to state anything.

    I do appreciate sharing where Mark Logic beat X-Hive. That helps add credence to the post.

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