City Cloud is proud to present a new partner for our Service Provider program. Severalnines are the creators of a database automation platform, which enables anybody to easily deploy, manage and scale their database on premise or in the cloud. Despite the company´s young age, Severalnines have already enabled over 7000 deployments for companies like Tecnicolor and Telekom Malaysia. In the beginning of this year they were also awarded “Best Cloud Startup” by EuroCloud Sweden. We are on the final stages of partnering up with Severalnines and took the chance to speak to their CEO and co-founder, Vinay Joosery, to find out more about the company and their service.
Hi Vinay and thank you for meeting with us. Let us in on Severalnines and your business. What is it that you do?
We build a database automation platform that helps companies run elastic databases anywhere, whether on premise or in the cloud. With our software, it is easy to deploy a database, scale it on demand, and manage all aspects of the database, from query performance to backups, upgrades and maintaining availability at all times. Think about it as a virtual DBA that helps with all aspects of the database lifecycle. Our automation platform is database agnostic. We support MySQL today, and plan to add support for other popular databases.
How long have you been in business and how big is your company?
We started commercial operations a year ago, and currently have 10 employees. It has been a busy and fun time, and we are currently focused on growing our operations in order to keep up with a rapidly growing user base.
How did you come up with the idea?
My co-founder Johan and I have worked many years in the database industry with a particular focus on open source databases. Although open source databases have been around for over a decade and are now widely adopted, users still have difficulties to run their databases and scale them when needed. This is where we saw that we can make a difference. It would be nice if IT people of all skill levels could easily create a database, manage it via an easy to use web interface, and scale capacity with just a mouse click.
Who needs your services and why?
Anybody who needs to run a database could potentially benefit from our service. The data deluge has started to transform businesses, governments, research and everyday life, driven by more online users, smart-phones, sensors and RFIDs. It is hard to find a company that is not experiencing a high growth in data. Even small startup companies with an online presence are generating large volumes of data. The data management problem is real, whether you are a small startup or a large corporation. For these companies, we make their database infrastructure elastic, cost-efficient, and easy to manage.
Which companies and organizations use your services today?
We have enabled over 7000 deployments since we started, the interest has been overwhelming I must admit. The most popular industries so far are Telecoms and Web. Our paying customers include large corporations like Technicolor and Telekom Malaysia. We have a number of references and case studies on www.severalnines.com/references. I would also like to mention our Startup program at this point. If you are a startup with less than 10 employees and one million euro in funding, we will give you free access to the enterprise software for 12 months. Just shoot an email to startup@severalnines.com.
Could you just briefly let us in on the technology here, how is MySQL clustering done?
Sure. We have an automation platform that knows how to deploy databases, whether it is in a private data center or on a public cloud. It has functionality to automate a lot of the routine tasks that a regular database administrator would spend time on, including tools to analyze database performance or apply software patches. It also watches over the database instances, and knows how and when to restart a database, how to handle failures, and how to redirect applications to another database instance if needed.
We met at EuroCloud Sweden Awards where you won the category “Best Cloud Startup”, how has that improved your business?
It was a great honour to win the award, and helped spread the word on what we were doing. We made some very useful contacts with potential partners, but also with prospects looking for serious vendors to work with. An independent organization like EuroCloud can play an important role to help educate companies and organizations on what new cloud related technologies are out there.
So, we are soon to be official partners and this is something that we are really excited about. What are your thoughts on our partnership?
CityCloud is an innovator in the Cloud Computing space, and a Swedish company like us. This is kind of cool. Our technical teams have been working together over the past few months, and the support we received has just been outstanding. I cannot wait for us to release some of the things we have been working on. We really look forward to a long-lasting relationship with CityCloud.
Cloud Camp is coming up and Severalnines is one of the sponsors, what are your thoughts on the event?
We see CloudCamp as a great meeting place to exchange ideas and information about the cloud and cloud technologies. We look forward to participating in these discussions.
We thank Vinay for the chat and hope to present some exciting news in the near future. Keep an eye out for more updates on our collaborations!