With the number of devices growing by the day, never before have companies been able to connect with consumers in so many different ways.
But so far, it has been difficult for them to keep up with all the data being collected. Not even the most powerful databases can.
With that knowledge, there is a new kid on the block looking to cause a disruption for legacy database vendors. They claim they have the solution that the big boys can’t provide.
Monte Zweben, co-founder and CEO of Splice Machine, believes his company can offer a speed, scale and cost that big vendors like Oracle, IBM and Microsoft can’t match.
“It is a David and Goliath story,” Zweben said. “We are taking on giants, but frankly the giants have been around for a very long time and are locked in a different architecture.”
He believes the legacy players are going about it all wrong and that the architectures of the traditional databases need a radical change. Zweben said that by being the first regional database marketing system on the Hadoop stack that can power applications, Splice Machine could bring about that change.
“Everyone out there building on Hadoop and big data really were addressing big data analysis problems where they dump data into this file system and crunch on it for a while … but nobody had figured out how to power applications on this particular stack with SQL.”
This allows the database to service terabytes of data with concurrent readers and writers, giving users the ability to have many connections to the database at the same time while simultaneously updating that database and keeping consistency.
Zweben said the key difference between Splice Machine and its larger competition is its scale-out model.
“The giants all want to scale-up their customers when they have performance or scalability problems, meaning heavier hardware and heavier computational resources in general,” he said.
“Our approach is radically different,” he added. “It’s scale out, meaning use a lot of inexpensive computers networked together, break up big computational problems to be simultaneously processed by all of those cheap processors and get at the problem by using commodity hardware and scale out rather than scaling up.”
Zweben believes consumers are ready for a cheaper solution and is not shy about taking on the big guys. He has already persuaded Harte Hanks, an Oracle client to switch to Splice Machine’s RDBMS for its campaign management application.
He believes, at a cost of roughly $5,000 a node, Splice Machine can solve problems that couldn’t previously be solved by more expensive alternatives. He sees implications in marketing, fraud detection and cyber threat security, as well as the “Internet of Things.”
But while he believes the scale-out model is the future of big data, he still feels it could take a while to be widely adopted.
“I suspect that as the players in this space become bigger like ourselves there will be acquisitions and strategic plays, but it’s very early days. We’re all just getting our first customers.”
For now, he is taking it one client at a time.
“It’s a very young company and is not going to be a threat to an Oracle for a little while. So what we’d like to do is get 10 to 20 customer stories where customers are live and deriving value, and we really don’t care about the competition from the legacy players really, other than that’s a great place to fish for our prospects.”
