After receiving an email about talking with Robert David, Director of Sales at KickFire, I checked out recent news on KickFire, as there had been little written about this company aside from the big splash they made at the MySQL Users Conference back in April 2008.
And, lo and behold, there was a piece of news, posted on October 14 - Kickfire Enters Into MySQL Enterprise Agreement With Sun Microsystems. It did not seem to garner any attention from the MySQL community yet, and the only source that picked up on this was "The Financial". Interestingly, the tagline of "The Financial" is "Open Source Information", which does not represent the same meaning to those of us working with open source tools. I don't know who is doing the PR for KickFire, but there might have been a skipped number on the speed dial somewhere.
This obviously was not as exciting as a headline like "Kickfire Machine Now in Production, Already Saving Dozens of Companies Thousands of Dollars". Or "Extended Data Warehouse Testing Beyond TPC-H headquarters Proves the Robustness of the First MySQL Data Appliance". Perhaps a review from Percona, Pythian, The 451 Group, or others listed along the panel of PlanetMySQL.org could add some fury to the data warehouse fire that is burning in the news lately.
Anyways, tomorrow I will find out what the latest news on this is; after all, since April 2008, it does seem like a race of turtles between MySQL 5.1, the KickFire Appliance, and the introduction of an affordable electric car with a decent range. I understand that quality of the product exceeds the quantity of time, so I am willing to deal with that. But for the last 2+ years, I have learned not to hold my breath over that.
2 comments:
Update: As it happens, KickFire is part of our proof of concept with an integration partner. As a result, this will be scheduled in the coming weeks ahead.
Hi David,
Thanks for your note on Kickfire. You make a couple of points I wanted to briefly address:
1) Kickfire as I believe you are pointing out, is not an open source company but we are an open source-based business, as Matt Asay mentions in his blog on our recent funding: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10002432-16.html?tag=mncol;title That is we have purpose built an appliance for the world's most popular open source database. This tie to MySQL is why we often get mentioned in Open Source news and the like as was the case in "The Financial".
2) Kickfire has not made a lot of noise recently because we have been quietly working with our beta customers in the months since we came out of stealth at the MySQL conference. I am happy to say the work has paid off and, as per our schedule, we shipped to our first paying customer this week. Once we have more customer deployments under our belt we do plan to make some more noise again :-)
I hope we will get a chance to meet in person during the course of the POC with our integration partner. Let me know if you have any questions. You can email me at karl@kickfire.com. Cheers, Karl
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