Open Source as a Business Model

Bringing Open Source to the Data Warehouse.

By wrapping MySQL around its software, Miriam Tuerk (CEO InfoBright), says, Infobright was able to take open source beyond the LAMP stack and make data warehousing simple, fast and easy.

In order to be competitive in whatever market or business you're in, companies need to be very smart and use analytics to run their businesses. You have to have the leanest, meanest logistics supply chain. You have to know that the market's going to turn so that you don't have too much inventory. If you don't do that very well, you won't survive very long. "We've seen a lot of Tier 1 companies go bankrupt in the last little while because of that" says Tuerk.

The reason business intelligence and analytics has grown so much is because the volume of data, the pervasiveness of electronic services, is exploding. So now, instead of just having a CEO run a report and look at metrics, every single employee in the company is doing that.

All kinds of data warehousing technology already existed out there. But, the problem was the technology was extremely complicated. It took weeks and months to set up systems and configure them. I remember someone saying once that there's a standard rule for a data warehouse: two, two and 50. It takes $2 million and two years to build a data warehouse, and you have a 50 percent chance of success. So there was an opportunity for Infobright to be a very disruptive force.

Think of Google as your analytic tool. If you want to know any piece of information today, you just go to Google and ask the question. You don't build the data set in Excel and sort through it and organize it before you ask the question. You just ask the question. So we set out a business plan to build something that was simple, fast and easy. "As we went to market, we learned you want all aspects of your business to be like that. The simplest, fastest and easiest way for a business to implement new technology is open source" says Tuerk.

Why open source?

You can just go to the Web site, you can download it, and you can get it up and running. You haven't had to go through procurement; you haven't had to have legal review a contract. You haven't had to go through the architectural review board. If you're a database administrator in a bank whose vice president of risk management comes to you and says, "I've got all these mortgage CDOs and all of a sudden they're not worth anything. I need you to run some analysis." You need to be able to do it fast without having to deal with your own bureaucracy.

So in 2006, Infobright took two steps toward open source. The first step was, we decided we needed to be part of a community that knew how to talk to our software. It's one thing to have this really great technology under the covers, but if it's a new technology that's too complicated to learn, you're not going to get adoption.

We were the first storage engine partner of MySQL. What we did was we took our software and wrapped MySQL around it... So the hundreds of millions of people who know MySQL and are certified on it ... they know how to use our software because on the outside, we look like and run like MySQL. Anything that works with MySQL works with us.

The second step was to launch the company open source in September of last year. And that has truly delivered a hockey stick for us. Up until September, we had eight customers. We finished last quarter with more than 50 customers. And that doesn't count the number of community users.