Solutions

Business in the 21^st century is driven by the web, and the architectural basis for the new web economy is the LAMP stack. A key component of LAMP is the MySQL database which is emerging as the primary repository of online information worldwide. As data volumes grow, the ability to rapidly analyze this information breaks down because MySQL is architected and optimized to support transactional systems. Kickfire is the first and only analytic appliance for MySQL enabling businesses that depend on MySQL analytics to:

• Improve profit margins
• Deploy services faster
• Offer new self-service, high-performance information applications
• Consolidate servers and data to reduce cost
• Achieve 10-100X analytic and reporting performance improvements
• Scale operations as data volumes grow

Kickfire's load and go analytic appliance is ideally suited to companies in the following verticals:

• High tech
• Media
• Network Management
• Retail
• SaaS
• Service Providers
• Telecommunications

Customers are leveraging Kickfire's analytic appliance in many ways as demonstrated below:

Marketing Analytics

The movement of services, communications and commerce online presents marketers with compelling opportunities. In the new online world, clickstream data and session history reflect actual customer behavior at a level of detail never captured before. Both B2B and B2C marketers can replace sampling techniques based on focus groups, opinion surveys and shopping observers with real data that reflects the entire population of prospective buyers. Today customer analytics distinguishes the leaders from the laggards. Leaders leverage customer analytics to optimize campaigns, dictate contact and advertising strategies, segment markets and improve the bottom line.

Retailers, marketing service providers, e-commerce companies, mobility service providers, telecommunications service providers, government organizations and others are working with Kickfire to better understand their data. Kickfire has transformed hour-long queries into queries that run in less than 30 seconds for one marketing service provider vs. their hand-coded, optimized queries. With Kickfire, this marketing service provider can allow more users access to their information and deliver new chargeable services to customers confident in the performance of the query system.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Software as a service (SaaS) applications continue to attract buyers with shorter implementation times, lower upfront costs, pay-as-you-go pricing, ease of deployment and use. The demand for SaaS applications has risen in all business categories, from large enterprises to SMBs and the acceptance and uptake of SaaS applications has increased in almost all geographical regions. As the amount of customer data managed by SaaS providers grows, so to does the demand for analytics and business intelligence. To be a viable and competitive alternative to enterprise applications, which for years have enjoy robust business intelligence and analytics capabilities, SaaS providers need an analytic engine with the power to rapidly provide fast, consistent response times to their customers ad hoc business queries.

Kickfire is working with LAMP-based SaaS providers to help them create new chargeable analytic add-on services to their applications. With Kickfire, SaaS companies can make larger volumes of MySQL data available to customers for analysis, eliminate expensive database tuning required to keep up with changing customer database schemas and deliver the lightening fast, high performance analytics that customers demand.

Network and Security Management Data Analysis

Today's network and security management tools monitor devices and generate ever-increasing amounts of as-polled network data. But the systems to analyze this data fall short in both performance and scalability. Often businesses are forced to analyze less data or buy multiple systems to scale to the desired amount. By removing these barriers and enabling analysis of historical data for longer periods of time, managers can more effectively evaluate application availability, plan capacity, determine appropriate thresholds to deliver users timely and relevant alerts and manage service-level agreements.

Network and security management tools providers and corporations across many industries are working with Kickfire to deliver greater value from their network data. One network management company has achieved 600X query performance improvements from Kickfire enabling them to offer trend analysis on a full year of data rather than the present maximum of 30 days data. And, higher performance means less hardware is required so this same customer will be able to consolidate 5-10 network analysis systems into one Kickfire appliance when fully deployed.

Embedded Applications

MySQL is increasingly becoming the embedded database of choice because of its ease of use and cost effectiveness. Today MySQL is being used as the backend database for hundreds of ISV and IHV solutions. While MySQL scales well for transactional workloads it is more limited for business intelligence workloads. As a result, those vendors who have adopted MySQL are now finding that their end users are starting to reach scalability and performance bottlenecks for reporting and analytics. To circumvent these issues, vendors are limiting their applications in terms of the data volumes that can be handled, the types of queries that can be run, and the number of users that can get access. This in turn limits the revenue potential and customer satisfaction of these key accounts.

Kickfire's high-performance MySQL analytic appliance removes these scalability and performance bottlenecks, while retaining the cost advantage of MySQL. One leading mid-market ERP vendor that has embedded MySQL in its reporting module saw a 500X performance improvement when using Kickfire. Another vendor in the network management space that embeds MySQL, saw a 600X query performance improvement. Because of these performance increases, vendors can now extend the data volumes they manage and consequently can charge more for their solutions and target larger, more strategic customers.