티맥스소프트

by Kelly McClure, Vice President of Global Marketing

March 17 is St. Patrick’s Day. Around the world, we celebrate it with green beer and rivers, shamrocks and shillelaghs, and big parties and parades—and it’s a great time for a bit of the blarney—telling tall tales. One of these tall tales is that St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland. Although there is no evidence that were snakes in Ireland before Patrick’s time, the myth persists. Scholars believe that “snakes” was a metaphor for “druids,” the leaders of the pagan religion that ended when Patrick converted the country to Christianity. In Patrick’s time, druids became associated with trickery and dishonesty.

Interestingly, we can apply snake metaphors to today’s databases. Active-passive clusters and years of legacy application data curl around databases like a nest of snakes, affecting performance and customer satisfaction. RDBMSs that are not designed for modern and cloud infrastructure can be as calamitous to business as a snake bite. And, there is a certain amount of trickery in many database and RDBMS licensing models.

In this blog post, we introduce you to the common database challenges you can drive out of your business and introduce you to three companies (in honor of the three-leafed shamrock that is one of St. Patrick’s symbols) that have successfully done so.

The cost of lock-in: The problem of today’s databases

Database management systems (DBMS) like Oracle are big line items in many IT budgets in terms of support and purchase costs. With restrictions on how to use these databases, many enterprises, perhaps even yours, feel locked-in to an inflexible monolith once they’ve chosen a solution.

This vendor lock-in is costing businesses billions worldwide. Many analysts say that enterprise-class databases are significantly overpriced, especially with the associated ongoing maintenance added to the cost. In addition, these large databases are often difficult to manage. Vendor database management systems have difficulty bridging the gap from data center to cloud. The result is an adverse effect on performance, stability, and reliability, along with a difficult learning curve and inflexibility.

To borrow from our St. Patrick’s Day metaphor, those are just part of the snake infestation. Buried deeper in the snake’s nest is the RDBMS licensing model. For example, Oracle has an RDBMS licensing model whereby, in a soft-partitioned virtualization environment, its customers are required to pay for 100% of the available physical cores—even if they’re not used. Other vendors offer a “by-the-core” licensing model for their RDBMS, but what they don’t say is that “pay by the core” only goes into effect if you’re adding cores.

Fortunately, there’s a way to drive all these snakes out. Three very different companies have done it. Let’s look at their stories.

Giving credit where credit is due: CTOS

As Malaysia’s leading credit reporting agency, CTOS collects credit information for individuals and businesses from a wide range of public domain and proprietary sources, and it also facilitates the extension of credit to businesses and individuals. CTOS needed a scalable database solution that offered better performance, data security, data consolidation, application integration, and cost savings than its current system offered. In this system, a Java application ran on three instances of Apache Tomcat with a separate MySQL database connected to each Tomcat instance. Performance, reliability, and scalability were next to impossible.

CTOS chose TmaxSoft Tibero to address their database management challenges because of its core business system, active-active clustering, active storage and transparent data encryption. After implementation, CTOS saw improved database performance and transaction handling. Query response time per 100 concurrent users decreased by 94%. And, Tibero’s application integration features allow it to work with the Java application without any code changes.

Flexing some CRM muscle: Horizontos Creativos

Horizontes Creativos is a marketing company that has been developing innovative projects for all kinds of clients for 25 years. Horizontes Creativos had decided to develop a new customer relationship management (CRM) system to serve as a single repository for all the different interactions the company had with its customers. In addition, the new CRM system needed a database that would deliver the flexibility needed to accommodate a wide range of clients and not consume 60% or more of the total development costs.

Horizontes Creativos selected Tibero as the central database of the new CRM platform because it was competitive in price and it perfectly adapted to the company’s methodology and development tools. Horizontes Creativos was able to reduce the costs associated with application development because Tibero is a robust, high-performance database with all the monitoring and management tools Horizontes Creativos needed. Horizontes Creativos now has a flexible database engine that can adjust to new projects by integrating with the company’s different systems.

Breaking free from the chains of legacy database costs: Heel España

Heel is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of natural medicines. After the company, headquartered in Germany, decided to replace a legacy CRM by developing one in-house, it thought its problems were solved. Unfortunately, the Heel España subsidiary, which searches for and researches natural ingredients, indicated that there was still a problem: the legacy databases in Germany were slow to update and hard to reach. So, as part of the CRM project, a search for a new database began.

Heel España chose Tibero because it offered predictability in pricing and licensing and the flexibility of installation on-premises, on a virtual server, or in the cloud. The project included a complete implementation of the Tibero database as a repository for the CRM and the migration of other Oracle data that is used for analysis and business intelligence processes. Heel España reports that Tibero has delivered an 80% improvement in processes such as data loading, importing, and BI reporting. Other benefits include architectural freedom and flexibility and cost control and predictability.

Ready to tackle your metaphorical database snakes?

You don’t need the luck of the Irish or St. Patrick to take care of your database challenges. Contact us for our 30-day free trial and see how Tibero balances agile development and security, improves workload efficiency and substantially reduces licensing costs.

About Kelly McClure

Kelly McClure is the Vice President of Global Marketing for TmaxSoft. Her 20-year marketing career spans both Fortune 1000 companies and fast growth technology startups. Kelly is responsible for leading TmaxSoft’s marketing strategy. She is experienced in aligning marketing and sales, building relevant content and messaging and developing integrated lead generation campaigns. Before joining TmaxSoft, Kelly served as the Vice President of Marketing for 10th Magnitude and held senior marketing roles with DataStax, BMC Software and Micro Focus. Kelly has a bachelor’s degree from Purdue University and an MBA from Loyola University Chicago.