30 Minute Interview

“Most DBAs and IT outsourced organisations are here in India”

Thor Culverhouse President and CEO ExtraQuest

After offering services, how did the idea of selling a related product come up?

ExtraQuest was started four-and-a-half years back by two database experts, one of whom is from Mumbai. They were experts in database technology and disaster recovery. They found that the existing software did not allow them to automate a lot of database tasks. So they thought of building a database platform for automating database administration tasks. During the development phase of the product they decided to build the services operational model and remote DBA.

ExtraQuest’s primary revenue source is outsourced database administration functionality. All our DBAs, both in India and abroad, use the product to monitor and automate somebody’s tasks so that their task is more efficient. In four-and-a-half months time, we are taking that product for launch to the public. Now when we go to customers, many of them are actually in favour of outsourcing their DBA technology. But some of them want to outsource a portion of their environment because of security reasons. Now we have a solution, they can install our product and automate their DB tasks. The launch is in late July. But we are using the product in existing customer service centres. It has been under development for about three years. We have built more intelligence into it, since we have been using it for some time. So when we launch the product, though the product will be new to the market, it has already been tested at our customer centres.

Your solution is supposed to cut DBA costs by 30 - 60 percent. How does that come about?

DBAs spend almost 15 percent of their time monitoring the database environment. The rest of their time is spent on mundane tasks that recur. We are building a platform that allows them to build scripts, what we call standard operation procedures, and automate many of their tasks. Our product will monitor the environment, the operating system, applications, network traffic, memory storage environment, and it can build and predict the level of intelligence. We have an expert engine for that. Soon we would be able to predict problems and automate some tasks. Our estimation is that the products can automate some of the tasks of a DBA, thereby cutting down the DBA costs by 30 to 60 percent.

Have you experienced inter-operability problems with existing databases?

We haven’t experienced any such problems. In a typical environment, we may have instances of Oracle, SQL Server or DB2. An organisation has to hire specialised DBAs for each platform like an Oracle DBA, an SQL Server DBA or a DB2 DBA. All the intelligence about how they run the environment, rests with individuals. So when that individual quits, all the intelligence is lost. Hence, we are building a platform for entire instances, independent of the database, collect data over time and build automated procedures. Since much of the mundane tasks are automated, the DBA can focus on other important tasks, which are part of higher layers.

Are you concentrating on Indian SMBs?

No. It’s an alternative for us. SMBs may have one or two DBAs and the organisations may retain their services for a long time. The product is better suited for large organisations running multiple platforms. So the more complex the environment, higher the need for our solution.

Could you tell us about India’s share in the global market?

Considering the amount of outsourced services to India and the fact that most DBAs and IT outsourced organisations are here, the share is large. That’s why our India operation is largely about services. In future though we do plan to have a product development centre with 24x7 technical support. Finally after we launch the product, we are going to build our sales operation centre for Asia.

Any research centres in India?

Our service centre acts as a research centre, because they use the product over here. Probably in the next three months, we are going to do the product quality assurance, technical support and product development. We are going to start developing the products over here.

Who are the main consumers for your database solutions?

Every company that has large amounts of data—financial services, software, IT outsourcing—and complex databases is our customer. I expect our company to grow by 150 percent every year.

— Toms Mathew