Company: ScaleArc
Website: www.scalearc.com
Founder: Varun Singh
Headquarters: Santa Clara, California, with R&D center in Mumbai, India
Year Founded: 2009
Investors: Trinity Ventures, Nexis Venture Partners
Employees: 25
Twitter: @ScaleArc
Company Description: ScaleArc is the pioneer in a new category of database infrastructure software that simplifies the way SQL database environments are deployed and managed, and lowers costs without requiring changes to applications or databases.
By Varun Singh, founder and CEO
Every time someone collects a penny on the web, a database is involved in some way or another. Databases are the backbone of all web transactions; from finding a hotel room for your vacation to playing online games, data-driven activities are driving enormous growth in structured and unstructured database environments. As a result, organizations face substantial cost and complexity when scaling their database architecture in a cost-effective manner, while increasing performance, visibility and uptime.
Been There, Done That
As the former CTO of Network 18’s web division (Network 18 is a $3 billion public company), I was responsible for building the highly scalable technology behind large websites like IN.com, MoneyControl.com and other portals. At Network 18, our unique user base grew from 250,000 users to more than 35 million users, sometimes experiencing traffic spikes of as much as 300 percent when events such as the Mumbai terror attacks would push hordes of news-hungry web users to CNN India’s website, or when a new IPO would drive traffic to MoneyControl.com (Asia’s #1 Finance Destination). Clearly, our business success relied upon our ability to rapidly scale databases and we needed a way to simplify database environments in a transparent way—databases were the hardest bit to scale, requiring constant application evolution, and a lot of concerted effort to optimize the smallest of queries that would hit a SQL database.
These challenges led to the formation of ScaleArc and the development of the iDB software infrastructure solution. iDB offers companies a ‘plug and play’ way to solve SQL scalability and management issues without requiring modifications to the application or database.
How do we do this? In a nutshell, the ScaleArc iDB (iDB stands for ‘intelligent database’) software abstracts database servers from application servers to increase database performance, visibility and uptime. The ScaleArc iDB software provides a wide spectrum of capabilities: real-time query-analytics and control, instant horizontal scaling for capacity growth or high availability, one-click query caching, automated sharding, dynamic load balancing, enforcement of security policies, and much more, in a single solution. But what our customers find most appealing is the fact that no changes to existing applications or databases are required. Customers also like the software’s analytics capabilities, which are like a ‘CAT scan’ showing precisely what’s happening on the backend server.
No viable alternatives exist on the market today. For example, several products exist for SQL caching, others address high availability, while others provide SQL filtering or help with sharding. However, each of these single-purpose solutions requires a significant investment in engineering resources to make the necessary, on-going changes to databases and applications in order to realize these benefits.
A New Approach
ScaleArc is pursuing a significant IP strategy with several patents filed that are in various stages of issuance. Our unique product strategy allows our products to interface with other technologies through well-established open standards such as SQL. Because the use of ScaleArc products do not require any changes whatsoever to existing applications or databases, the product is easy to adopt. Most notably, the ScaleArc iDB software solves in one product a number of pain points that would normally require several pieces of possibly incompatible software, as well as significant custom coding or changes to applications, databases, or both.
Customers routinely describe ScaleArc iDB as “amazing” and acknowledge that it addresses a real pain point for which “there is nothing like it on the market.” While the total available market for ScaleArc is measured in multiples of billions of dollars already, the growth of data and transaction/query volumes everywhere indicates a consequent growth in the total available market for ScaleArc. At the same time, the trends towards cloud computing, database as a service, mobility, big data, and social enterprise all increase the cost and complexity of backend database environments, making it increasingly important for customers to deploy a simple and versatile solution that does not require any changes to their applications or databases.
Looking Forward
With our recent funding round and strong customer reception, we are continuing to build a presence in the U.S. through the formation of a strong reseller/VAR channel backed by in-house sales personnel, strategic go-to-market alliances with complementary companies, a service and support network, and community building.
ScaleArc is also looking to hire! About 60 percent of our new hires will be made at engineering headquarters in Mumbai, India, with the remainder in the U.S. We’re looking for top-notch engineers with expertise in data analytics, data mining and information extraction, as well as C, C++ and web developers. All technical candidates must have some experience with SQL servers. We will also continue to pursue proof-of-concept trials with U.S.-based customers—several of which are underway—and we’re finalizing the formation of a prominent customer advisory board.
ScaleArc – www.scalearc.com
