It’s been a crazy month here at Kickfire which is why I have fallen a bit behind on my postings – a new product, new customers, a new CEO, a new relationship with Sun/MySQL, a new website … and a new baby girl! Here’s a quick summary of all that has been going on:
New Product
We quietly came out of beta a month ago. After nearly two and half years in development, this is a great achievement for the company. The team took on a hugely ambitious project: to re-design how SQL is processed today to be able to deliver an order of magnitude improvement in price/performance relative to any other data warehousing solution on the market. This project involved bringing together over 50 of the industry’s smartest database and hardware engineers to build a new type of database machine that includes the world’s first SQL chip, an ultra-modern database kernel, and advanced system features. Kickfire’s four data warehousing benchmark world records and subsequent customer performance results have proven that the team has successfully delivered on this lofty goal.
New (Paying) Customers
I will write about this in more detail in a future post but I wanted to include a couple of reference quotes from some of our early paying customers to give a sense of the performance results they are seeing:
“In the global deployments of our largest customers, MySQL performance placed limitations on the volume of data we could analyze. Kickfire’s MySQL Appliance delivered impressive 600X average performance improvements in our tests with much larger data volumes than we could previously support. We just placed an order.” Research Director, Network Management Company
“We started evaluating Kickfire for the excellent price/performance they deliver for MySQL which we use extensively. After the initial tests showed performance improvements of over 100X for some of our most complex queries, we decided to purchase our first system.” SVP, $400M High-Tech Company
New CEO
We just announced today, Bruce Armstrong, as our new CEO. We’re all very excited to have Bruce join the company. He is a respected database and data warehousing veteran who brings with him a wealth of public and startup company experience. He started his career by helping to build Teradata, the data warehousing giant, into a successful public company. Following its acquisition by AT&T/NCR he was named president of the Teradata subsidiary and an AT&T company officer. After Teradata he was VP and GM of Sybase’s $700M database business. Prior to joining Kickfire he was CEO at startup KNOVA which he grew from a private venture to a public company. We all think Bruce makes an excellent addition to the Kickfire team and will help us take the company to the next level.
New Relationship with Sun Microsystems
On October 14th we announced an important global, multi-year agreement with Sun. As part of this agreement all of Kickfire’s 2000 and 3000 Series Appliances will come with a pre-packaged MySQL Enterprise (TM) subscription. This agreement builds on our earlier work together to announce record-breaking TPC-H numbers. This announcement reinforces Kickfire’s absolute dedication to and focus on MySQL. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we have built our business around MySQL as we believe it will evenutally establish itself as the #1 deployed database by virtue of its ease of use and cost benefits. This sea change in the database world will ultimately benefit hardware vendors, not software vendors which is why Sun spent a billion dollars on MySQL. Kickfire’s vision is to become the #1 hardware platform for MySQL for data warehousing and business intelligence applications.
New Website
OK, so it’s not completely new but our Marketing team did upgrade our site to include some nice new features. As an example, I like the image below that appears on our home page highlighting the Kickfire difference. When people ask me to describe Kickfire’s difference in a nutshell I talk about the SQL Chip, MySQL, and being a true appliance. The first gives us the industry’s best price/performance. The second means we operate as a standard. The third delivers a true plug-and-play experience. All three requirements are critical for the data warehousing mass market (sub 10TB) which is Kickfire’s sweet spot.
And a New Baby Girl
To end on a personal note — and by way of an excuse regarding my dearth of postings — in addition to all the excitement at Kickfire over the last month, my wife and I welcomed little Zoe Margaret to our family. We are thrilled to have her with us, as is her older sister Maia. That said, my daily routine is completely upside down right now. All I can say is thank God for coffee!
