NuoDB: Entering the next phase of growth. A conversation with Executive Chairman Barry Morris
First posted on NuoDb blog on Aug 31 2015 – https://www.nuodb.com/blog/nuodb-entering-next-phase-growth-conversation-executive-chairman-barry-morris
After building the company from ground up, founding CEO Barry Morris has transitioned into a new role, that of executive chairman, where he will dedicate a majority of his time on fostering customer relationships and forging new partnerships. Parna Sarkar-Basu sat down with Barry to discuss market trends that are driving growth today and his plans for future expansion.
What will be your key focus as executive chairman?
We’re at a point where we have built all the basics. We have a phenomenal product, lots of customers and worldwide reach. Next will be a rapid growth phase. I want to build relationships with customers and partners and drive the front end of our growth. We are selling our database software to the largest companies in the world. Our customers are betting the farm on us. Databases like ours will be in use for decades. Therefore these relationships are critical. It’s all about me being there and working with the senior executives, making sure we are solving their business problems.
What are some of the trends driving growth and what are customers looking for?
We build the only transactional database that connects next-generation data centers via a single (logical) database together. Data centers are moving to commodity hardware now – with lots of small machines within public or private clouds. The reality is that the databases that run our planet today don’t run on small machines. The $40 billion database market that is controlled by large vendors like Oracle and Microsoft is all about big machines and not about next-generation data center computing. But companies are moving to the cloud. The drivers are cost, flexibility and availability of services.
What type of database should businesses use today and why?
The large databases still run on one machine. But companies have users all over the world. You don’t want them to have to access the machine where the database runs across the ocean. That is not acceptable performance. At the same time, as a user, you also wouldn’t want your checking account to have a different value in New York vs. London. What businesses need is a database that will runs in different locations simultaneously and that provides data consistency in all those places no matter who makes changes to the data in any location in real-time. That might sound technical and simple, but it’s really very hard to do. And that’s the problem we’ve solved.
What are your plans around partnerships?
We have a solid partnership strategy focused on geographical reseller and solutions partners. We have also developed several key strategic technology partnerships. These partnerships are critical to expanding our footprint into various enterprise accounts and important to our customers’ success. The box we play in is about building a transactional database management system for modern-day transactions. It’s a noisy and complex market. That is the valuable problem in databases and one that we solve uniquely. To further expand our reach, we will partner with large organizations with large sales teams to complement our internal resources.