A Korean company that recently entered the Canadian market wants potential customers to consider a database management system (DBMS) taste test between its recently updated offering and Oracle.
TmaxSoft’s Tibero 6 is an SQL relational DBMS that is compatible with databases including Oracle, Microsoft SQL and IBM DB2 and can be used on a wide range of platforms, including Windows and Linux on x86, AIX on PPC, and Solaris on SPARC.
TmaxSoft Canada president and CEO Satya Sarangi said it can scale and conform to commonly-used cloud architectures.
“Managing data is becoming a big issue,” he said, adding that this includes big data, of course, but there is an increase in the number of transactions and the size of the transactions are growing data-wise across different industries.
Sarangi said typically most data is structured, “but even the structured data needs a relational DBMS.”
TmaxSoft has gone through several iterations of its Tibero relational DBMS, which can run any number of applications for big data, decision support and financial transactions. The company has focused in particular on high availability and security, as well as providing a lower-cost alternative to Oracle, which Sarangi said to date has been replaced by more than 150 of TmaxSoft’s customers.
The company spends more than 45 per cent of its revenue on research and development, said Sarangi, and has been growing the footprint of Tibero in Asian markets. It wanted to make its product “rock-solid” to take on competitors. “North America is a pretty competitive marketplace.”
In Canada, TmaxSoft is targeting companies of all sizes in different sectors, including finance, retail, telecommunications and government, said Sarangi, by positioning Tibero 6 an enterprise-class replacement for incumbent offerings, particularly Oracle, whose customers feel trapped, he said, and are looking for an equivalent DBMS that is less expensive but easy to migrate to.
Last September, Oracle drew fire for changes to its licensing strategy when it launched version 2 of its Standard Edition database by halving the number of sockets customers could use with the product to two, and each socket can only use a maximum of 16 CPU threads. The controversy over Oracle licensing heated up again earlier this year, when software licensing group the Campaign for Clear Licensing published an open letter to Oracle’s executive chair Larry Ellison, asking the company to be more open with its licensing structure.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has been reminding customers that it is ending support for SQL Server 2005 in April.
Tibero has been designed to be compatible with Oracle so it can be easily dropped into a customer environment. The company has helped customers port data over many times, said Sarangi, a migration process that generally takes four to six weeks.
Currently the company offers a program that allows potential customers to try out Tibero 6 with a trial licence for either the standard or enterprise edition on a virtual appliance to test capability for applications by pointing them to Tibero, said Sarangi. “It’s easy to point applications to our DBMS.” He claims Tibero’s licensing, maintenance and overall TCO is half that of other enterprise options.
From a features perspective, TmaxSoft has focused particularly on security and high availability in part by leveraging data clustering as a means to support redundancy and failover, Sarangi said. “Clustering is a very critical component from a relational DBMS perspective,” he said. An example of how it might support redundancy is for a retailer during the Christmas season as it sends out holiday offers via email. Its primary email database could fail, but the Tibero DBMS guarantees seamless failover, said Sarangi. “You don’t have a disruption in the campaign.”
