Early-stage venture company Xeround has come up with a way of using virtualisation software to make multiple data sources look like a single logical data source.
The company believes its approach to database virtualisation, which has already been commercialised and is in use at a small number of big name businesses in the US telecommunications sector, could eventually find multiple uses within enterprise IT shops.
CEO Charlotte Yarkoni CEO of the Bellevue, Washington-based software vendor explained that the company started out as a research and development operation in Israel with the intention of developing carrier-grade data management technology.
“The software we’ve developed has been shaped by the data resilience, data access, data accuracy and data latency performance characteristics of large telco businesses, which are very different to the needs of financial services, say. Telco has become a focus market for us, but what we do is very applicable to other sectors.”
She said the Intelligent Data Grid (IDG) product has already been deployed by T-Mobile US, since it was launched in the second quarter of 2008.
The software allows companies to access and unify data across multiple networks and business units in real-time.
It effectively relaxes the tight connections that exists between applications and data, makes data easily accessible to new and existing services, and supports fast response time for data access and updates.
Because it provides virtual, distributed access to enterprise data regardless of geography, host systems or network, the company claims IDG helps increase the efficiency of existing infrastructures without needing to rip and replace legacy systems.
In telco it has been used in the customer management and billing arenas to simplify subscriber data stores, managed converged prepaid and post-paid billing data.
“We think the software has broad relevance as data management discussions change over time, and views about enterprise data stores start to shift as we understand how to leverage the benefits of software-as-a-service and cloud architectures,” Yarkoni said.
“Tomorrow’s databases are going to be fundamentally different from what we are all used to with the traditional relational database system. Database federation is a relatively new concept, and we want to continue to strengthen our capability in that area, and how we handle unstructured data management.”
Database federation allows the connection of databases so that tables, views and other objects in relational databases and some non-relational data sources such as XML files can be accessed as if they were in a single database.
“In that scenario Xeround’s software can be used as a database of source. We become the logical database, but one’s that virtualized,” she explained.
The company claims not to have a direct competitor, but in the telco sector says it will come up against Alcatel and Nokia/Siemens, as it will products like the Oracle TimesTen real-time data management software.
Xeround is venture-funded and closed a Series B round of $16M in funding in July 2008 led by Ignition Partners and Trilogy Partnership, with participation from existing investors Benchmark Capital and Giza Venture Capital.
