Last week brought news of a partnership between IBM and 10gen, whereby the two companies would work together to achieve interoperability between IBM’s DB2 relational DBMS and 10gen’s MongoDB NoSQL database. As part of the partnership, IBM will push MongoDB as a core NoSQL database for enterprises building web and mobile apps. At present, DB2 is second in market share in the RDBMS market behind Oracle, whereas MongoDB is the leader in the nascent NoSQL market, apparently owning almost half of the market. Both players see significant competition in their respective segments – especially MongoDB, competing against DynamoDB, Couchbase and so on in a rapidly evolving market.

This feels quite a bit like an alliance of the needy, and a potentially effective one at that. The emergence of NoSQL has a lot to do with the high availability requirements of mobile and web-based collaboration. In that context, IBM gains some good street cred by partnering with MongoDB as the promise of unlocking insights from semi-structured and unstructured data increasingly drives enterprises towards NoSQL. On the other side, with competitive solutions such as HBase for true big data applications around enterprises, MongoDB could use a channel like IBM to penetrate the broader market.

VCs have funded multiple NoSQL approaches over the past five years, so the realities of monetization are probably starting to set in now. In that context, IBM’s announcement should set in motion a wave of consolidation here. While the days of one-size-fits-all databases might be over, the reality also is that the NoSQL folks might not be able to scale without a larger mother-ship. So then, it’s time to get ready for a few exits, let’s stay tuned…