Kickfire Launches Analytical Appliance

Kickfire has launched an analytic appliance, with what company officials say is the performance capability of large commercial database systems, to the mass market. 

 

The data warehousing mass market is essentially deployments in the gigabytes to low terabytes which, according to IDC (News - Alert) numbers cited by Kickfire officials, represent "over three quarters of the total market." Kickfire’s analytic appliance targets the MySQL segment, which company official’s peg at 12 million active installations and with a brisk growth rate of over 30 percent a year.

The MySQL market does present some pretty big challenges to existing data warehousing vendors, as customers down here want the performance - but are a lot more price-sensitive than larger customers. They have limited data warehousing expertise and few IT resources, and early-stage data warehousing deployments of the kind typical in the mass market generally have mixed workload characteristics which other vendors cannot support.

 

Last week, TMC  reported that Kickfire entered into partnerships with ten Systems Integrators to "accelerate its go-to-market plan." Selected for their "leadership status and deep expertise in their respective fields," according to Kickfire officials, these SIs bring "data warehousing, business intelligence and MySQL skill-sets plus nationwide coverage."

Targeting of the mass market in an economic downturn is "right on the money," says Wayne Eckerson, director of Research for The Data Warehousing Institute. "This is an under-served market."

Price is certainly put forward by Kickfire as a competitive selling point, as the product starts at $32,000. It has an SQL chip which company officials claim "packs the power of 10’s of CPUs," as well as a column-store engine with full ACID compliance. It's being touted to greenies as a good combination of small form factor and low power consumption. And of course with a plug-and-play design, users don't need a lot of pricey data warehousing expertise and IT resources. The appliance also has features like Active System Monitor, which notifies users of any potential system anomaly, and runs standard MySQL Enterprise.

 

Kickfire is backed by venture capital firms Accel Partners (News - Alert), Greylock Partners, The Mayfield Fund and Pinnacle Ventures.