MySQL appliance vendor Kickfire raises $20 million

Kickfire is one of the coolest open-source (based) companies to launch within the last few years. Today, it announced that it has raised $20 million in series B funding to tell the world about what it's doing.

What does Kickfire do? From a business angle, it has figured out a clever way to monetize MySQL's excellent software. From a technical angle:

Based on a patented SQL chip that packs the power of tens of CPUs into an exceptionally small, low-power form factor Kickfire delivers a quantum leap in performance efficiency--avoiding the hardware build out, power, and space costs of today's data warehouse and database offerings. By delivering astoundingly fast query performance out of the box, Kickfire enables organizations to use MySQL for demanding business intelligence, reporting, and analysis rather than migrating to costly, non-open source alternatives.

One question arising from this: Why doesn't Sun do this? Sun knows semiconductors as well as anyone, and it now knows MySQL better than anyone. Kickfire has a leap on the competition, but could Sun prove to be a spoiler?

For now, Kickfire is the best game in town when it comes to easy-to-deploy supercharged MySQL performance. Very cool.

[alegr]

Sounds like a perfect snake oil business prospect. A lot of buzzwords making no sense in whole, but each sounds cool.

[Matt Asay]

I'm not so sure. You don't get these kind of backers (Mayfield, Accel,etc.) for a weak business.

[bmurphy96]

While the technology is complex to say the least, it certainly isn't snake oil. It remains to be seen what Kickfire will be able to do, but you are making a mistake by dismissing them. The best analogy for what they are doing is the graphics chip (GPU) that you have in your computer. Fifteen years ago you could not get an "accelerated" graphics card. All the processing was done by the CPU. However, today, the GPUs in some cards are very close in power to the power of your CPU. It accelerates your system greatly when the graphics processing is offloaded to the GPU. Kickfire is building the SQL equivalent of an accelerated graphics card. It's a rough analogy, but its the best one I have.

I wrote an article about it for MySQL Magazine (the spring issue). It is available here: http://www.mysqlzine.net. Issue four. It's a free download.

I don't work for Kickfire, and I have seen the product live and running. They have customers who are beta testing it currently. Hope that helps.

Keith