NuoDB secures backing from Informix founding CEO

NuoDB has secured an investment from Roger Sippl, founding CEO of Informix. The amount of the investment is undisclosed. NuoDB provides a cloud-based database management system.

PRESS RELEASE

Today NuoDB, Inc., the leader in webscale distributed database technology, announced that Roger Sippl, founding CEO of Informix, has invested in the company. The amount of the investment is undisclosed.
Roger Sippl co-founded Informix Corporation in 1980. Informix was one of the original four relational database companies, and as the leading RDBMS for UNIX systems it became a $1 billion public company before being sold to IBM. In addition to founding Informix Sippl was co-founder of The Vantive Corporation and founder and CEO of Visigenic Software, both very successful public software companies.
Sippl joins other database pioneers as an investor in NuoDB. These include:
• Gary Morgenthaler, Morgenthaler Ventures, previously founder & CEO of Ingres;
• Mitchell Kertzman, Hummer Winblad, former CEO of Sybase; and
• Nilanjana Bhowmik, Longworth Ventures, formerly an executive at the leading object-oriented database company, Object Design, Inc.
“SQL database systems that scale-out elastically are exactly what people are looking for in these days of cloud computing and scale-out datacenters. CIOs want to deliver capacity-on-demand by adding and deleting machines from a running database,” stated Roger Sippl.
“NuoDB uniquely delivers that with a radical next generation internal architecture, and delivers valuable additional capabilities like continuous availability and geo-distributed operation too,” added Sippl.
Database DNA benefits customers
The addition of Sippl makes NuoDB unique in the database vendor landscape. The company investors include three former CEOs of the four original relational database companies.
The investors’ extensive knowledge of data management and distributed systems is leveraged to continuously improve the NuoDB product without requiring customers to forgo the established benefits of SQL.
Supporting quotes
“When we built the RDBMS products of the last century, we had to assume CPUs for multi-user applications were expensive refrigerator-sized monolithic beasts. Memory was precious – the first machine Informix ran on had only 512K bytes of memory for 8 users in 1980. Our internal designs were entirely focused on conserving those CPU and memory resources,” stated Sippl.
“We all knew that someday we would be able to employ many processors in parallel and lots of memory to solve computing problems such as database transactions and queries, with massive scale and high speed. It was unclear what the architecture of such a system would be, until now,” concluded Sippl.
“Distributed technology is destined to become the fundamental building block in every layer of 21st century enterprise infrastructure. NuoDB has the solution that will dominate the cloud database market for the next few decades in a manner similar to how Oracle, Informix, Ingres and Sybase dominated RDBMS in the previous era,” concluded Sippl.
“When datacenters change database systems change,” stated Barry Morris, NuoDB CEO and Co-Founder. “Scale-out SQL database systems have been an industry aspiration for 30 years, but in the current climate the absence of a simple solution is now holding back cloud adoption in the enterprise.”
“NuoDB’s architectural innovation changes the game, enabling the cloud at the database layer, and delivering breakthroughs in service levels and costs,” concluded Morris.
About NuoDB
NuoDB was launched in 2010 by industry-renowned database architect Jim Starkey and accomplished software CEO Barry Morris to deliver a webscale distributed database management system that is specifically designed for the cloud and the modern datacenter.
Used by thousands of developers worldwide, NuoDB’s customers include automotive after-market giant AutoZone, Europe’ssecond largest ISV Dassault Systèmes, Zombie Studios and many other innovative organizations. NuoDB was one of only nineteen vendors cited on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Operational DBMS.