The database industry is rapidly evolving and going through some major transformation. And it's really, really exciting if you think about it, and you're interested in the way the market is evolving. So we at Quest are seeing five major trends when talking to our customers and interviewing prospects in the marketplace.
One of the first major trends that we're seeing is that information technology decisions are actually being driven by line of business. Gone are the days where you had these monolithic ERP implementations that were driven down by the IT organization. Now, line of business is in need of responding significantly faster to the customer needs.
And when we talk about line of business, we're talking about sales, marketing, and those types of organizations. And they're actually driving a lot of technology strategy these days. And so what that means is it's forcing IT to respond faster or to become a service or a marketplace in order to support the line of business.
In addition to that, though, if IT organizations are not moving fast enough for the line of business, sometimes what we're seeing is that the line of business will actually drive their own information technology decisions. Some examples of this that we've started to see are things like the citizen data scientist-- data scientists that live within the line of business organizations that are actually providing tools, capabilities, techniques to help these line of business organizations to make data-driven decisions to more effectively drive outcomes for the business. Another area that we're seeing this is the growth of software as a service vendor. It's now so easy with the Cloud and other capabilities to create a software company, develop a software application very, very quickly.
So what's happening is is there's a shift in power from where IT kind of drove technology strategy to where a line of business is actually the impetus for driving a lot of technology strategy now. And so that forces IT to be very responsive, and they have to act fast.
So the second major trend that we're seeing is because line of business is focusing and forcing information technology, the IT organizations, to respond fast, IT still has a lot of older applications, mission critical applications 20 years old or older that they're still supporting. And the line of business needs the IT organization to respond quickly to these changes to support the market. And so what's happening is that IT is now having to adopt different development methodologies in order to respond faster to the market needs from line of business. And so that trend is actually manifesting itself in what we're seeing in this notion of DevOps, continuous integration, continuous development, continuous deployment so that we can adapt and make changes incrementally to our software products and into software applications and distribute that out to the end users as quickly as we can. So that's one of the major trends that we're seeing in the marketplace today.
Another major trend that we're seeing in the marketplace today-- no surprise-- is that the finance organizations are putting pressure on IT. They're putting pressure on IT to reduce cost. And it's one of the areas in which we're seeing this cost pressure is coming inside of infrastructure and hardware in particular. So as a result of the cost pressure that IT is facing, they're looking for ways in which to reduce their cost. And so one of the opportunities that they're seeing is the Cloud.
So the Cloud allows for IT companies to get out of the infrastructure, get out of the hosting and the data center business, so that they can focus on driving application development to ultimately lead results for the line of business and for the business as a whole. Their core competency doesn't need to be inside of a data center or inside of hardware. So Cloud computing, multi-hybrid deployments is really coming as a result of this cost pressure coming onto IT organizations from finance.
Another trend that we're seeing, however, is also in the way of the reduction in cost associated with licensing. So traditional database vendors-- you think the Oracle, SQL Server, and Db2 from IBM-- those were the big three. We consolidated the market down to the big three probably in the early 2000s, and so the cost of software has gone up because of that. And so companies are now looking for ways to reduce their licensing cost without sacrificing the capabilities and the functionality with the databases that they're used to.
So one of the things we're seeing is this movement towards open sourced relational databases-- things like Postgres, things like MySQL, which are really starting to take shape because their functionality offers many of the similar capabilities that we see with relational databases like Oracle, SQL Server, and Db2. And so companies are able to reduce their total cost of ownership from a licensing perspective without actually affecting or sacrificing functionality from a database perspective.
The other thing that we're also seeing as part of this cost reduction is that applications and computing has changed radically since over the last 20 years. So not only the Cloud-- and the way in which we process and compute data is actually very different, and there are more efficient ways to do that. So now, application developers are looking for different ways, different tools, and different types of databases to support the new ways in which they can do compute.
So one of the examples, another trend that we're seeing, is this rise of NoSQL databases-- things like MongoDB, Cassandra, Hadoop, data lakes, et cetera, that are really starting to grow. And so now there's this actual proliferation in different types of databases and types of data and computing as well, which is really fascinating. And all of this-- at the same time, because many of these are open source tools, it's with the objective of reducing the cost of ownership
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