Xeround's Intelligent Data Grid

Yaniv Romem, Chief Scientist, and John Trembley, VP of Marketing at Xeround introduced me to their company, the company's history and their "Intelligent Data Grid" (IDG). The promise of IDG, they explained, was giving organizations extremely high performance, distributed access to multiple datasources on multiple systems in the environment. Words I've heard others use to describe capabilities of this nature are "distributed data grid," "distributed cache," "database virtualization" and "I/O virtualization."

Xeround promises to provide features such as:

• data partitioning - allowing portions of the data to be maintained on separate machines
• geogrphical distribution - allowing those machines to be on the local net or somewhere else in the world
• persistance of data even when its source is no longer available
• data source virtualization - providing access using common methods to different types of data
• "continuous availability"

Here's what the company has to say about their products

The Xeround Intelligent Data Grid™ or IDG™ Suite is the only database virtualization solution that unifies data across multiple networks and lines of businesses so customers can reduce total cost of ownership and deliver new services to market faster. Unlike point products or custom solutions, Xeround's scalable, reusable, easy-to-implement distributed architecture dramatically increases the efficiency of existing infrastructures.

Xeround has a strong focus on the telecommunications industry

As the telecommunications industry transforms from network-centric to subscriber-centric models, Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are redefining their business models to offer unprecedented personalized and flexible services. This has put a new set of requirements on their data management infrastructure and demands a new means to manage subscriber data. Xeround IDG™ is optimized for such requirements and delivers, uncompromised, six key requirements necessary for entity-centric data management:

• Unlimited scale-out performance
• Continuous availability and resiliency
• Guaranteed low read and write latency
• Unified data model with network and geographical distribution
• Native industry standard interfaces and transaction handling
• Optimized for COTS blade architectures and near zero administration

The company is making their technology available as three software packages: Xeround IDG Core, Xeround IDG Unify and Xeround IDG Sync.

Snapshot analysis

After contemplating on the capabilities of their product, I decided that they were telling me a story that I had heard before (seeExtreme transaction processing and Gemstone Gemfire Enterprise for more on this topic.) The only signifcant difference in the message was the support of multiple APIs making it possible to drop this technology into an established environment and require few changes.

When I asked about the necessary changes, Xeround pointed out the obvious that organizations that stuck close to international standards when developing their programs, the introduction of Xeround IDG into the environment was largely painless. If the organization, on the other hand, chose to use each and every proprietary extension of their database software, they were going to be faced with the necessity to adapt what they're doing to an environment based upon database standards.

Unasked for shoot-from-the-hip advice

Xerond, the technology you've developed and put into production in the telecom industry appears sound and powerful. Distinguishing what you are doing from what completitors such as  Gigaspaces, Gemstone and Oracle's Tangasol are doing is going to be one of your primary challenges. Although there are IT decision makers who will immediately understand what you are offering, most will not want to invest their over-subscribed time to understanding how your technology differs from that being offered by others.

My suggestion is work on creating simple, clear, understandable, fun, real life erxamples to present each of your key features. Each of them could be presented in the form of a paper, podcast or video that presents the problem, what pain that problem creates, a utopian model for eliminating the pain and then compare your technology to that ideal. If this content can be made interesting enough and is presented in many places, potential customers will find it on their own because they are seeking answers to their own painful problems.