VoltDB, maker of a high-velocity database by the same name, announced that its new pricing program for startups is enabling new companies to speed up app development and bring technology to market sooner.
The Billerica, Mass., database vendor said companies such as Auvik Networks, Koupon Media and Ten Penny Auctions are taking advantage of VoltDB’s startup pricing to bring solutions to market faster in their respective industries.
The company’s VoltDB-S program is for early-stage companies with $250,000 or less in total annual revenue, and offers access to the VoltDB specialized high-velocity, in-memory database. The intent of the program is to accelerate the development of disruptive solutions that deliver on the initial promise of big data applications—enabling real-time, more informed decision making that directly benefits an organization’s bottom line, the company said.
The VoltDB in-memory database is built to support applications capable of quickly ingesting massive amounts and types of data and performing analysis and “decisioning” in real-time. The VoltDB-S program provides developers a cost-effective way to leverage and scale these capabilities and quickly begin delivering data-driven benefits in a range of industries.
For instance, Auvik Networks is a developer of a cloud-based IT network management service; Koupon Media is a provider of a Digital Campaign Management (DCM) platform for retailers and brands that unifies the creation, distribution, redemption, and analysis of digital coupons and promotions; and Ten Penny Auctions is a U.K.-based startup that is building a software-as-a-service (SaaS) online auction platform.
“Our founding principle was to deliver the next generation of database tools, leveraging big data for transformative, real-world business value,” VoltDB CEO, Bruce Reading, said in a statement. “Our goal with respect to VoltDB-S is to assist new, innovative application development companies that share our vision for the future of database technology and want to create new products that will change the impact of data on modern organizations.”
Reading said startups also can use the free, community edition of VoltDB, but that edition does not provide all the production-ready features as the commercial, enterprise edition. Also, users of the community edition do not get the full VoltDB support and implementation services that come with the commercial product, Reading told eWEEK. Paying customers also get access to Volt University, which gives enterprise and independent developers insight, tools and best practices they need to build applications to run on VoltDB.
Under the VoltDB-S program, startups gain access to VoltDB for a monthly charge of $500, or if they choose to sign up on an annual basis, for $300 a month. “So they can pay $3,600 or $5,000 a year, depending on how they want to purchase it,” Reading said. Regular pricing for the enterprise version starts at around $15,000 per year.
Earlier this year, VoltDB announced that its total customer accounts grew by greater than 1,000 percent in 2012 and total customer bookings grew at an even faster rate year-over-year. VoltDB’s customers include marquee enterprises such as AOL, Booyah, Bursa Malaysia, Cowen Group, Pinger, Quality Health, Sakura Internet, Shopzilla, SignMeUP, Social Game Universe, Yahoo and Yellowhammer. Indeed, 2012 was a record year for the company’s performance and major milestones, VoltDB officials said. VoltDB has more than 275 customers and is poised to have another 1,000 percent growth year in 2013, Reading told eWEEK.
“We had a strong year in 2012 and set the stage for even greater growth in 2013 by building a world-class team to support the demand for the world’s first high-velocity database,” Reading said in a statement. “The truth behind big data hype is that, in order to deliver business value, applications need a database that can ingest, analyze and act on massive volumes of data in as close to real time as possible. VoltDB is the first to solve this problem by narrowing the ingestion-to-decision gap from minutes, or even hours, to milliseconds.”
The VoltDB in-memory database was designed by several well-known database system researchers, including Michael Stonebraker—who was involved in the development of Ingres and PostgreSQL, Sam Madden and Daniel Abadi. It is an atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability, or ACID, compliant relational database management system that uses a shared nothing architecture. It includes both enterprise and community editions. The community edition is free software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 3, and includes a subset of the features in the enterprise edition. VoltDB implements the design of the academic H-Store project.
Moreover, VoltDB is a NewSQL database that supports SQL access from within pre-compiled Java stored procedures. The unit of transaction is the stored procedure, which is Java-interspersed with SQL.VoltDB relies on horizontal partitioning down to the individual hardware thread to scale, k-safety or synchronous replication to provide high availability, and a combination of continuous snapshots and command logging for crash recovery.