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RIS: RIS Ltd has recently assisted Oracle experts Dbvisit to identify and qualify Channel Partners to expand their business in Asia. However, few in the industry know of Dbvisit and the technology offered to assist Oracle customers. Dbvisit's primary products expand the functionality of Oracle Standard Edition. Please tell us more about these products:

Arjen: Dbvisit Standby and Dbvisit Replicate are database replication products for Oracle Standard Edition (SE) databases. They provide for real time back-up and disaster recovery for Oracle databases including reporting, migrating and consolidating Oracle to Oracle, MySQL® and Microsoft® SQL Server databases. Every Oracle Standard Edition database needs such a service, and Dbvisit's solution is fast to deploy and avoids the cost of an expensive upgrade to Oracle Enterprise Edition.

RIS: What put you onto the idea of why such products were needed in the market and so forming your company?

Arjen: I was formerly an Oracle database consultant and recognised a need in the Oracle market, particularly in the mid-sized customers, for a database replication product providing back-up and recovery protection. So I started Dbvisit in 2006, and increasingly Oracle customers and resellers saw the opportunity for this product.

RIS: Your target customers are the installed base of Oracle Standard Edition -- do you see Oracle themselves and their products as a competitor, and how do you position yourselves relative to Oracle?

Arjen: The biggest competition to Dbvisit is for the Oracle customers to do nothing and hope that a disaster never happens! Obviously this isn't a very wise position for any business, and Dbvisit can be installed without the need to interrupt the business operation, and so assuring business continuity. Competition to Dbvisit would be Oracle themselves -- but this does require an upgrade to the Enterprise Edition (EE) version, and then use Oracle's Data Guard. So for Oracle Standard Edition, even Oracle's own staff have recommended Dbvisit if the customer is not willing to upgrade to Oracle Enterprise Edition (EE). At 20% of the cost of an Oracle upgrade, we're a compelling solution. Otherwise there's no other competition.

RIS: So you have a good relationship with Oracle?

Arjen: Yes we have a good relationship with Oracle -- we drive business for Oracle who themselves are less focused on mid-sized accounts. Customers who use Dbvisit do frequently buy other Oracle products and licenses so the partnership works well. We do roadshows with Oracle for replication and disaster recovery, and participate in Oracle's events.

RIS: Vision -- your website doesn't have one stated -- do you have one?

Arjen: Dominate the worldwide market for database replication in the mid-market!

RIS: RIS engages over 8,000 of the key Channel Partners in Asia of which close to 2,000* have some form of Oracle relationship. How do Channel Partners position Dbvisit to their customers? And of these 2,000 partners, what would be the ideal profile of a Channel Partner for Dbvisit?

Arjen: Dbvisit requires hardware for the Oracle database, training, consulting, and disaster recovery knowledge. This is compelling for resellers for the services value-add, and hardware resale where needed. Hardware for back-up is still needed, and would be the same as, or slightly lower spec' for typically off-premises location.

Partners very quickly understand the Dbvisit value proposition, it's an easy sell and they 'get' the solution very quickly. Disaster recovery is a great way to recruit partners, and we do have a compelling offering. Dbvisit does not do implementations, and so we do not compete with our partners on services. We started with an "internet" model, and because customers were downloading the product directly the product needed to be easy to install and implement. Oracle is complicated with multiple configurations, so Dbvisit caters for multiple config's, and web-based frontends and backends. In addition to making the installation easy, the alerts can be sent to the administrators, but before the administrators are alerted automatic retries are configured before raising alarms with thresholds being customizable at multiple levels.

RIS: So Channel Partners find Dbvisit easy to sell?

Arjen: Our fastest deal was four and a half hours for a reseller, who was selling to a Bank where they needed standby disaster recovery. They found us on the web, and the spec's were formalized, budgets agreed, invoice raised, paid, product downloaded, and production keys sent; all within one afternoon.

RIS: So how big do you think the opportunity is for Dbvisit in Asia-Pacific?

Arjen: Our revenue targets are set with an aggressive growth rate per year, and we have been exceeding our targets for the last 3 years. Deloitte have us in their 500 fastest growing tech companies in Asia Pacific. In Japan alone 70% of Oracle customers use Standard Edition, and so our target market being Oracle SE is very large. Already we have over 800 customers in over 80 countries.

RIS: The Cloud model -- your website quotes "Whatever your cloud strategy, database disaster recovery (DR) with Dbvisit Standby is a natural fit. Our system creates and maintains synchronized real-time copies of your Oracle production database in the cloud ready to be used at a moment's notice; our cloud partner, Amazon Web Services (AWS), securely stores the copies on-demand and there are no upfront infrastructure costs, no wasted resources, use as much as you need". How does Dbvisit enable Channel Partners to embrace the cloud model**?

Arjen: There is a strong push to the cloud, and Dbvisit is cloud enabled. We work with AWS for a cloud provisioned EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Instance where the customers have their own Oracle licenses, and EC2 provides for a consistent and predictable amount of CPU capacity. AWS provides access to an Oracle DB server allowing Dbvisit, and Dbvisit Channel Partners to offer an "on-premise to the cloud" migration service, and provide the mechanism for replicating to an RDS (Relational Database Service) or EC2 DB which still needs to be monitored and managed by partners. I believe there will be a hybrid model and some DB's will be migrated to the cloud, and some won't, with data being migrated to and from the cloud. We have a real-time replication product called Dbvisit Replicate for Oracle to MYSQL or SQL server. Reporting can be off loaded to MYSQL in the cloud which is also a low cost option. The mid-market customers typically don't have sophisticated in-house IT skills, and the migration services and monitoring is still a good service revenue stream for our Channel Partners.

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For more information, please contact: Hugh Sutherland from Dbvisit who can be contacted via hugh.sutherland@dbvisit.com or www.dbvisit.com

* RIS has a RIS-Report on the major Oracle and Database Channel Partners in each country in Asia. For Vendors to buy this report from RIS please go to www.rishk.net or mail us on marketing@rishk.net.

** This has led to the creation of a "RIS-Report" where the RIS investigates and profiles the major Cloud Channel Partners across Asia-Pacific. To buy this report from RIS please go to www.rishk.net or mail us on marketing@rishk.net.

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