Bob Zurek

Over the course of the next several weeks, I will be blogging about our core vision and product strategy while also providing perspectives on our next generation roadmap. With this in mind, let me first get started by discussing the topic of Collaboration, a core tenant of our product strategy.  At the heart of our product initiatives are our customers, community members and partners. Infobright has embraced a highly collaborative and agile product development and product management process with our customers, community and partners to ensure we are rapidly meeting the key goals and objectives facing our customers' use of our product. This effort is to ensure they are getting significant value and ROI out of the investments they have made in our products today and into the future. Our agile processes enables us to deliver high value features in short bursts of time that directly meet the requirements requested by our customers, community and partners. This agility has met with positive feedback from all.

To further expand upon the theme of customer collaboration in our product vision and strategy, Infobright has deployed forums for collaboration, not only with Infobright employees, but also with community participants, customers, partners and database professionals that are either using or have interest in using Infobright. This community forum serves as a primary source of collecting, communicating and sharing critical information with the community of Infobright users and to allow a forum for users to help users. This forum is wide open, not private. What you see is what you get and what you get should be quick responses from both Infobright and other community members.

Infobright has put in place a continuous feedback loop for ensuring that our new product initiatives and our roadmap match our customers most important initiatives. To expand this level of collaboration we are currently in the midst of forming our first Infobright Advisory Council to further assist us in collaborating with and gathering detailed feedback from our great customers, community members and partners. Let us know if you are interested in becoming a member of this council by contacting us via email at info@infobright.com. This is just another example of how Infobright can ensure multiple continuous collaborative feedback loops by working closely with our customers on strategic corporate issues and initiatives.

Corporate visits both onsite and offsite also serve as an important venue for sharing customers' and partners' strategic initiatives with Infobright.  At these meetings, we also provide customers, community members and partners with an opportunity to learn about the overall direction of the company.  This collaboration strategy ensures we have a significant number of customer interactions and to make sure our customers understand the direction of Infobright to partner for mutual success. This includes this blog post.

So what are we hearing?

•  Well, the first thing that is loud and clear from our customers and partners is that they very much enjoy working with our products and the fast turnaround times they receive in regard to their product requirements.
•  The second thing is that we are helping them significantly reduce the complexities associated with their core analytic database requirements, from the ease of implementing our software to the elimination of the complexity of tuning and managing/editing indexes, something that we have worked hard on over the years.
•  Finally, strong query performance without manual tuning or having to get into the complexities of scaling-out multiple servers. Infobright's focus is on extracting as much performance out of low cost commodity hardware, which continues to increase in performance per Moore's Law. Just look at the new processors coming from Intel. For us, the sweet spot is in the range of 150 GBs to 50TB uncompressed. With our deep compression ranging from 10:1 - 40:1, Infobright delivers great performance at far less cost and with far less hardware than anyone else. Yes, some will talk about BIG DATA and in terms of petabytes, but most businesses have a critical job to do in getting analytics solutions running quickly with data volumes in the tens of TBs and less. Our customer Austin Energy is a good example of this type of success. (Read the case study at http://support.infobright.com/Support/Resource-Library/Whitepapers/).

When vendors in the database market who are focused on large scale data warehousing try to push their products for use as data marts, smaller data warehouses or for analytic applications, the problem is that their complexities don't disappear. Scaling up on commodity hardware leveraging all the processors available is our focus, something I will discuss in an upcoming Roadmap blog as I drill down into some of our core roadmap efforts. In the meantime, we look forward to collaborating with you.