Thought Leaders in Big Data: Don DeLoach, CEO of Infobright (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about your company. Is it a bootstrapped company or venture-funded? Very quickly, what is the history of the company?

Don DeLoach: We are privately-held and are venture-funded. As you would expect with venture-funded companies, there are limitations to what we will disclose but I can give you rough numbers. We have roughly 250 or so direct customers and about 30 OEM relationships that, by extension, have somewhere in the area of 250 to 300 large customers. We don’t count the smaller ones. One of our OEM relationships probably has 8,000 customers but we’re not including that in the number. The other thing is, by virtue of the 250 that we have, that covers among other things almost every telco operator in the world.

If you look at the larger providers, they generally have installed three to five different solutions from our various partners. Our reach into that market is pretty vast at this point. Many of those large providers will have a given solution installed in 120 nodes within some of the larger carriers. Our solution is very production-tested and our reach is truly global. We have OEM partnerships in North America, Europe, and Asia.

We were founded by four Polish mathematicians – three in Warsaw and one in Toronto. The founder in Toronto left a little while after the founding of the company, which was in late 2005. The thrust of the company though was always around the utilization and leverage of rough set mathematics. As it turns out, the University of Warsaw is an epicenter for that body of work. The company is headquartered in Toronto and our three main operations are Toronto, Chicago, and Warsaw. They originally were funded by RBC Ventures and not much later, Flybridge out of Boston came on as well.

We’re jointly funded by RBC and Flybridge. The company started as a consulting company but within the first year, the founders recognized that what they had built to support their consulting efforts was in essence a column-based data storage with some unique qualities around leveraging rough set math. That actually evolved into a product company. We generally were fairly small for the first few years as we figured out where we were and what we were doing in the context of the broader market and some of the more general purpose solutions that were out there.

In 2010, we began to focus all of our efforts around storing and analyzing machine data. That’s based on the recognition that our product really has those unique values. We have patents that have been granted around the approach that we take and we made the decision to narrow our scope in 2010 to focus solely on storing and analyzing machine data. That has proven to be a very good strategy for us. As a result, all of our customers are using us in some form or fashion to do that. But like I said, the thing that has evolved more than anything is that in the last four years, we’ve seen our OEM partnerships really flourish because the capabilities that we present to them are game-changing in some way. It’s been a good ride for us in that regard. That is what you’ll continue to see us do as we look to further adapt our product to make it easy to accommodate as the Internet of Things unfolds.

Sramana Mitra: The company has been around for nine years?

Don DeLoach: Yes. I joined in 2010 but the company started in late 2005.

Sramana Mitra: You’re headquartered in Toronto?

Don DeLoach: That’s correct.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Don DeLoach, CEO of Infobright
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