'7 Minutes' with NuoDB SVP of Sales Stephen Fahey

**Editor’s Note: “7 Minutes” is a feature where we ask channel executives from startups – or companies that may be new to the Channel Partners audience – a series of quick questions about their businesses and channel programs.**

NuoDB burst onto the database scene in 2013. Now in use by companies including Dassault Systems, Kodiak and IoT platform GadgetKeeper, NuoDB is considered an Elastic SQL database. It straddles the space between traditional RDBMSes, like Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server, that focus on consistency (“single version of the truth”) and newer distributed NoSQL databases, such as Cassandra, MongoDB and PostgreSQL, that lean more toward availability by spreading data across multiple nodes. While NuoDB is a SQL database, its availability comes from a multi-site, scale-out model. Other examples of this “distributed RDBMS” architectural model include Google’s F1 database, which underpins Google’s ad business, and Microsoft’s new Azure SQL.

NuoDB’s Stephen Fahey

Where does the channel come in? Stephen Fahey, NuoDB’s SVP of sales, sees opportunities for not only traditional consultancies and SI that have long helped customers select databases but also partners entering the cloud service provider space and those considering developing SaaS offerings. No matter what your business, it’s a good idea to understand the changing database landscape. There’s a lot at stake — misconfigured databases in Amazon and Microsoft clouds have led to major security breaches.

Earlier this month the company launched NuoDB 3.0, which can operate in an active-active-active deployment model across three availability zones, making it easier for customers to operate in hybrid or multi-cloud environments. Version 3.0 supports AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform as well as Docker containers.

Channel Partners: Tell us what customers love about your product or service. What’s the secret selling sauce?

Stephen Fahey: Our customers are all in the midst of a transition. Whether they actually call it a “digital transformation” initiative or simply a directive to move to either cloud- or container-based development, they’re looking for ways to be more agile, lower costs and improve customer satisfaction.

The funny thing is, while there are a ton of databases out there, there are actually very few that are really designed for these next-generation environments. You either have traditional relational databases that don’t operate very well in a distributed, cloud-centric world or you have NoSQL databases that give you the scalability and availability you need, but give up “little” things like, oh, strict transactional consistency or the huge SQL ecosystem that makes designing applications easier.

So they turn to us because what they need is an elastic SQL database. That is, they need a SQL database that keeps all the properties a database of record expects – strict transactional consistency, data durability, high performance, etc. – but can also scale on demand, run in containers or on …

… multiple cloud environments (even across clouds), stay up and running even during hardware or data center failures, and is aligned with the cost structure of the cloud.

Many of our customers are also looking to write to the same database from multiple data centers in an active-active configuration, and that’s something that’s pretty hard to do with other relational databases, but that is what we support out of the box.

CP: Describe your channel program — metal levels, heavy on certifications, open or selective, unique features?

SF: To be honest, our channel program is still in its infancy. We have a few international partners to help support our efforts outside of North America and Western Europe, but we’ve primarily sold direct. As we look to expand, however, we’re actively growing and evolving the program. As a result, our partners are getting a lot of support across our organization because we want to make sure that this new channel is successful. As we grow and evolve, you’ll begin to see more standard partner features.

Right now we see two key channel areas: The first are traditional consultancies and systems integrators, like NAYA Tech, who typically specialize in data management technologies. These are the experts that companies are turning to to help them build next-generation data centers or to advise on their digital transformation initiatives.

The second is a little different. Because of our value proposition, we have a lot of current success with software development organizations that are transitioning to a services-based model. For example, a software company that’s made its name and business off of selling on-premises software and is looking to start providing a SaaS offering. In stage one, we serve as the underlying database for their cloud offering because it fits all the needs I outlined before. In stage two, however, we’re finding these strategic customers become strategic partners as well, as they realize the benefits our elastic SQL database gives them. As a result, they’re becoming resellers as well as customers and bringing NuoDB to their own on-prem customer base.

CP: Quick-hit answers: Percentage of sales through the channel, number of partners, average margin. Go.

SF: We’re just beginning to really invest in our channel program, so we expect to see a significant amount of growth in this area, particularly as we pursue our two key channel paths. Average margin will depend on the type of partnership and the partner’s commitment level, but we we work closely with partners to make sure it’s a win-win for all of us.

CP: Who are your main competitors, and what makes your offering better?

SF: Our competitors fall into three camps.

The first are the relational databases designed decades ago for the client-server era. We’re talking about Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2. Even so-called cloud databases like Amazon Aurora fall into this camp because they’re often based off of MySQL. Now, these are really great databases, but they simply aren’t designed for modern architectures. Their architectural design and licensing model is based on a monolithic, pre-provisioned environment. They can’t scale well; they’re usually confined to …

… a single data center; they’re subject to failure, and they often require expensive machines to achieve high performance.

Some of those challenges can be overcome with good planning and architectural choices, but it still requires a boatload of complexity, extra software and money to do it. No one really wants to share their database, for example, nor does anyone want the complexity and cost of adding GoldenGate or Real Application Clusters to their Oracle instance.

The second group of competitors are the NoSQL providers. These are the guys that have risen to prominence precisely because they’re designed for distributed environments. They scale well and can tolerate failure. Unfortunately, to achieve this, they gave up SQL and ACID guarantees. If you’re migrating an existing application, that means you have to rewrite a good chunk of the application to incorporate data management logic. Even if you’re building a new application, you’re baking in that complexity – which means that it will take you longer to get your product to the market and it will be more difficult to build new features for it because you always have to be QAing the data management components. And many applications simply need strict transactional consistency.

The final competitive category are the other Elastic SQL databases. These are products like Google Cloud Spanner or CockroachDB. Both of these only came out of beta earlier this year, so they haven’t been battle-tested like NuoDB has (we first came on the market in 2013), and they only have partial SQL support, so they’re not great if you’re migrating an existing app or need a rich SQL interface. And obviously with Cloud Spanner, you have to commit to the Google Cloud Platform on top of it. NuoDB runs on-premise, on Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, or any combination of the above.

CP: How do you think your technology portfolio will change in the next three years?

SF: We expect to keep improving our database. There are always new use cases to tackle and improvements we can make to the database. Already, for instance, we are seeing more and more demand for container-based deployments, and thus we are expanding our integration with, and capabilities for, container-based deployments. We’ve been expanding our partnership with Red Hat and their OpenShift platform as one example.

CP: How do you expect your channel strategy to evolve over that time frame?

SF: As I said earlier, we expect the channel to become a significant part of our success over  the next few years. We’ll be developing more programs and dedicating more staff to it as we go. .

CP: What didn’t we ask that partners should know?

SF: The data-management market is pretty crowded. With NuoDB, partners can create a truly differentiated offering in an area that will continue to be hot for many years to come. The challenge for NuoDB is that people don’t realize that what we do is even possible. That’s where trusted partners come in — as you’re advising customers on how to build next-gen data centers and what it takes to succeed in digital transformation, you can introduce them to a technology that’s really the bedrock of those initiatives, and you’ll look like a hero doing it.