SOURCE: Kickfire

July 30, 2008 08:00 ET

Kickfire Raises $20 Million in Series B Financing

High-Performance MySQL Appliance Positioned for Rapid Adoption in Fast Growing Open Source Database Market

SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwire - July 30, 2008) - Kickfire™, Inc. today announced that it has closed Series B financing. Pinnacle Ventures led the round and Series A investors Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, and The Mayfield Fund reinvested. The capital will be used to build out the sales, marketing and customer operations infrastructure to bring the Kickfire appliance to market.

Kickfire developed the first MySQL appliance to capitalize on the analysis and reporting needs of the more than 11 million active MySQL installations that are struggling to support explosive data volumes. In a July 2008 report titled Market Update: Open Source Databases, Forrester Research estimates the size of the open source database market including software licensing, technical support, and services will reach $1.2 billion by 2010. Noel Yuhanna, principal analyst states "More enterprises are deploying open source databases than ever before, with many planning mission-critical deployments in the coming years. Sun Microsystems' acquisition of MySQL further validated the open source database market's worthiness, and enterprises can now expect even more reliability and improved support in the coming years."

"Open source solutions are becoming hugely popular but it has not been clear how to build profitable companies that leverage this exciting technology trend until now," said Ken Pelowski, founder and managing partner of Pinnacle Ventures who has joined the Kickfire Board of Directors. "By packaging MySQL which is the third most deployed database in an appliance, Kickfire is targeting the multi-billion dollar hardware market associated with the rapid MySQL adoption."

"Kickfire brings the performance of proprietary high-end commercial databases requiring racks of commodity hardware to the MySQL market at a fraction of the cost. Because our design delivers high performance at the lowest possible cost, we recently shattered performance records in the non-clustered category as well as price-performance records on the rigorous industry-standard TPC-H(1) data warehousing benchmark, becoming #1 in the world at 300GB," commented Raj Cherabuddi, CEO, president and co-founder of Kickfire. "We look forward to bringing this incredible innovation to market later this year."

About Kickfire

Kickfire provides the first high-performance, easy-to-use open source database appliance for the burgeoning MySQL market. 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. Kickfire appliances scale from gigabytes to terabytes and are based on commodity hardware and Linux. They leverage existing storage as well as the openness of MySQL and its entire ecosystem to ensure compatibility and rapid deployment. Kickfire is backed by blue chip venture capital firms Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, The Mayfield Fund and Pinnacle Ventures. For more information, please visit http://www.kickfire.com

(1) As of July 29, 2008, the Kickfire Database Appliance Series 2400 delivers 54,895 QphH@300GB (Queries per hour on the TPC-H benchmark) propelling Kickfire to world leadership in query performance (non-clustered systems) on the 300GB TPC-H benchmark. Kickfire is also number one in price/performance at $0.89/QphH@300GB USD on the 300GB benchmark. Moreover, Kickfire delivers this record breaking performance with a 3 year total system cost of only $48,790 USD. Kickfire's price performance metric can be found at http://www.tpc.org/tpch/results/tpch_price_perf_results.asp. The Kickfire Database Appliance is in beta and will be available October 14, 2008.

TPCH, QphH and $/QphH are trademarks of the TPC. For additional information on the TPC-H benchmark, please visit the Transaction Processing Performance Council's Web site at http://www.tpc.org/.

Kickfire is a trademark of Kickfire, Inc.

Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, MySQL, and The Network is the Computer are registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems in the United States and other countries.

All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.