OceanBase Annual Report 2021: Technology Makes Easy Data Management and Use

"In the last year, OceanBase Database enterprise customer has doubled to more than 400 and non-financial customers have contributed more than 30% of the revenue," said Yang Bing, CEO of OceanBase, at the 2021 Distributed Database Developer Conference on the morning of January 6. This is the first time that OceanBase released its customers and revenue data.

In recent years, the Chinese government promulgated many supportive policies for China's database industry. As a result, many achievements have been made by database developers to lay a solid foundation for the rapid development of the database industry. Based on the estimation of the International Data Corporation (IDC), the relational database-based software market in China grows rapidly with a compound annual growth rate of 29.5%. Undoubtedly, the combination of distributed databases and the cloud is the trend for future database development.

OceanBase, as an active member of the database industry, also made many achievements last year.

01 OceanBase is becoming the first choice for core system upgrades

Practices show that OceanBase is becoming the first choice for enterprises to upgrade their core systems. Last year, OceanBase was recognized by many third-party authorities.

The Survey on Selection and Satisfaction of Chinese Distributed Databases jointly carried out by IT168 and ITPUB shows that OceanBase Database is the most welcome distributed database in China and is the first choice for financial enterprises to build core system databases.
The latest research report of Gartner shows that native distributed databases will be the trend for data processing in the future and an increasing number of enterprises prefer to use OceanBase Database for core database upgrades.
The latest research report of Forrester shows that OceanBase is the only Chinese database provider with midsize annual revenue and is one of the three global vendors that provide all the features defined by Forrester for distributed databases.

02 Application of OceanBase Database in financial and non-financial sectors

Last year, OceanBase Database, a representative native distributed database for enterprises, focused on serving customers in the financial industry. At present, one-fourth of the leading financial enterprises in China take OceanBase Database as their first choice for core system upgrades. To be specific, more than 50 out of 200 leading banks and insurance, securities, and fund enterprises in China are customers of OceanBase. In addition, OceanBase also ranks first in market share in regional banks and insurance, securities, and fund enterprises.

"This shows that OceanBase Database is qualified to meet diversified financial requirements and is fully trusted by customers," said Yang Bing. In addition to its extensive application in financial scenarios, OceanBase Database extended its application in many other industries in 2021 to support infrastructure.

According to Yang Bing, the revenue of OceanBase in non-financial sectors accounts for 35% of the total revenue, and this number is rapidly growing.

Centralized management of human resources and social security systems in multiple provinces

For example, Jiangxi is the first province that uses Chinese databases for its human resources and social security systems. It is also the first province that replaces existing databases of social security information systems with Chinese databases across the province in a centralized manner. OceanBase Database ensures efficient, stable, safe, and uninterrupted system operation provides 24/7 service support for enterprises and individuals and significantly reduces the time for generating premium collection plans from 16 hours to 9 minutes. This way, the unified management of human resources and social security information across the province in one network is implemented. In addition to Jiangxi province, four other provinces also use OceanBase Database as their core databases for human resources and social security systems.

Digital transformation of industry-leading enterprises

In the energy industry, OceanBase helps Sinopec combine its 23 scattered fuel card systems into one fuel card system and supports more than 20 million transactions for nearly 30,000 gas stations per day. OceanBase integrates the data, platforms, and applications of Sinopec and helps transform Sinopec into a comprehensive service provider.

In the electric power industry, OceanBase helps State Grid Corporation of China ("State Grid") solve bottlenecks in its key business scenarios and advances the evolution of distributed technological architectures in the industry. To be specific, OceanBase Database improves the performance of State Grade in electricity bill generation by 37%, bill collection by 40%, bill prepayment by 16%, and automatic metering by 59%.

Cost reduction and efficiency increase of telecom operators in multiple provinces

OceanBase helps Shandong Mobile reduce the billing response time by 90%, increase the bill processing efficiency by 30%, and reduce the storage cost by 90%. As a result, the hardware and O&M costs of Shandong Mobile are greatly reduced. In 2020, Shandong Mobile was listed by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology as a demonstration pilot project in network security technology applications.

In addition to the preceding scenarios, OceanBase Database plays a key role in industries related to national welfare and people's livelihood, such as healthcare, public security, and transportation.

03 Customer-oriented and sustainable software development

The continuous iteration and refinement of technology are the keys to meeting the diversified requirements in various industries. OceanBase made great progress in hybrid transaction/analytical processing (HTAP), compatibility, and cost-effectiveness last year. OceanBase Enterprise Edition and OceanBase Community Edition were iterated eight times, and more than 5,300 code commits were made throughout the year. OceanBase Database is fully independently developed. Therefore, it can be fast iterated to promptly meet the diversified requirements of customers.

In this process, OceanBase developed an important business model of product-led growth (PLG). Yang Bing asserted that "Sustainable software development and the PLG model are the cores of OceanBase. Product competitiveness is always essential to the development of OceanBase. Good products improve themselves during application. To build a world-class database, OceanBase needs feedback from global customers and scenarios."

04 Open source: a small but sound step forward

We are serious about making OceanBase Database a great open source project. As a new player in the open-source community, OceanBase made significant achievements last year.

Users: more than 23,000 community users, 100 external developers, and 100 customers
Community contributions: more than 4,000 GitHub stars, 860 forks, and 640 commits
Talent training: joint training centers with six colleges and database training in more than 20 colleges for teachers
Technical documents: more than 750 knowledge bases and 4,600 Q&As
Technology promotion: four offline meetups and seven online courses

In addition, we make continuous efforts in talent training. To popularize databases, we released textbooks and online courses. And we held database contests. Meanwhile, OceanBase provides a talent certification system to cultivate database talents for society and promote the development of the database industry.

Published four professional textbooks and e-books for more than 3,500 students
Organized the 2021 Database Contest with participants from 246 colleges, 200 enterprises, and 1,179 teams inside and outside China
Cultivated more than 10,000 talents with proficiency in OceanBase Database for society

After reviewing achievements made in 2021, OceanBase is ready for opportunities and challenges in 2022. As Yang Bing said, it is a good time for the database industry. We will take every opportunity to achieve a better future.