TmaxSoft Looks To Cut Database Costs With Help From Channel

Infrastructure software provider TmaxSoft has announced a deal to make its Tibero RDBMS available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux through an Amazon Machine Image.

The Tibero database is compatible with applications that depend on IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL, Oracle and other SQL-based databases. The company’s main targets are organizations that want to cut costs — Joshua Yulish, U.S. CEO of TmaxSoft, cited a university running Oracle 10g with 30 TB of stored data, 1 TB of daily transactional data and 17,000 concurrent users. It switched to the Tibero RDBMS and saw a 14 percent improvement in performance while lowering TCO by 51 percent.

Yulish told Channel Partners that the company gets more than 60 percent of its business through its “rapidly growing” channel program, which is focused on systems integrators, VARs and ISVs.

“At Tmax we are looking to drive license revenue,” said Yulish. “We have made a conscious decision to not build a robust services team, but rather work with the channel to deliver on our behalf.”

He says the company’s VAR partners see a growing number of customers looking to move off legacy database systems, and many VARs are building data migration and management services businesses around Tibero, which the company says provides enterprise-class scalability, security, clustering and performance. {ad}

TmaxSoft also recently named Oracle veteran Sanjeev Sanotra as its U.K. channel sales manager.

Of course, enterprises don’t switch databases lightly, and this market is dominated by Oracle and Microsoft, supplemented by open-source options like MariaDB, PostgreSQL and MySQL. However, Oracle caused a stir in September when it clamped down on users of its entry-level Standard Edition database by limiting sockets to two and CPU threads to 16. The Tibero AWS VM allows customers or partners to configure and order Tibero on RHEL directly from the AWS marketplace. For customers now feeling the pinch, the Linux instances running on AWS should be helpful from a sales perspective. Partners can give customers an opportunity to try Tibero for minimal investment before committing. Besides allowing for enterprise hybrid deployments, it’s also a new option for …

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… small and midsize customers that are dependent on database performance.

TmaxSoft says Tibero licenses run about half of Oracle’s cost, with ongoing support priced at 20 percent of the license fee. It has completed nearly 140 Oracle-to-Tibero conversions to date; Yulish says changeovers take, on average, six weeks and that end users and database administrators easily adjust to the new interface. For partners, those migrations are lucrative services offerings.

“The value to our channel is that our mutual customers need help doing the migration, and our goal is to have our channel deliver those services versus Tmax doing them internally,” says Yulish. “This allows the channel to put their additional value-add services on top and build a robust data management practice.”

He says the company, which is based in South Korea, is focused on driving such services through the channel, in addition to referral and resell business.

“We have not only partnered well with the channel, but in numerous cases brought partners into deals, not the other way around,” says Yulish. “This has created a strong bond and helped everyone involved realize incremental business results.”

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