Last week’s IT Press Tour in Valletta, Malta, attended by vendors, press and analysts, showed up a wealth of channel opportunities in the data management space. IT Europa was there to map them.
DigiFilm
France-based DigiFilm Corporation is developing a “sustainable” and “cheaper” data archive with its Archiflix film system.
Antoine Simkine, DigiFilm co-founder, said a typical US film studio spends about $20,000 a year on digital preservation of each title. Over 50 years, this amounts to $1m. Technology migrations and manipulations required will “inevitably lead to errors and losses”.
“If a film has not been exploited for some time, financially driven decisions will lead to discontinuing maintenance, which will result in the work disappearing for good,” said Simkine.
While cinema films are indeed an archive target for the Archiflix technology, Simkine told the IT Press Tour: “Cinema is only 5% of what needs to be stored on this media. DigiFilm offers customised solutions for providers serving content owners. We’re not a service provider ourselves, we are creating business opportunities for other people.”
Simkine claims that data stored on Archiflix film will “last 100 years”. “Providing you have the readers/sensors to access the data, and you always will considering how the film industry evolves, you will be able to read your data in 100 years’ time.”
DigiFilm has developed a machine with storage capacities that can be accessed on-premises or through the cloud as-a-service. The commercial launch of the service is expected next year, with the firm having already built a “commercial prototype” machine for storing the film.
The cost of using the system through service providers, which lease the machine, is based on a combination of usage and film data volume. The type of partners Archiflix is seeking include film labs, service providers to national armed forces, architects, transport companies, geospatial firms, oil and gas companies, mineral extraction companies, the public sector, and other verticals that use data that has to be accessed long-term.
Manticore Search
Manticore Search is a high performance open source search engine platform that came out of the Sphinx open-source software project that ceased to exist by 2017. The founders took on the technology to commercialise it for various industry verticals, while keeping it open source.
The company is now interested in establishing channel partnerships, and is aiming to drive marketing to make the technology more visible to potential buyers.
Manticore Search is a fast, lightweight, and fully-featured database with full-text search capabilities. It can tackle the “pain points” of data search and management, said the provider, including slow queries, high resource consumption, scalability issues, complex queries, and setup and maintenance complications.
“We solve these issues. Tools are supposed to make things simpler, not more complicated,” said Sergey Nikolaev, CEO and founder of Manticore.
He said Manticore Search is “easy to use”, offered an “intuitive setup”, offered vector search, both MySQL and JSON support, data backup, as well as multi-modal storage (row-wise and columnar).
The company makes money through professional services around the open source software, support subscriptions, and new features engineering. “We have monetisation and SaaS plans going forward, and with the right partners we can take Manticore to the right level,” said Nikolaev.
“We have no real marketing, and are almost invisible to the market, although we do have a few hundred installations. New venture capital investment may well help improve our visibility.”
The channel is another focus for the vendor to increase product visibility, with specialist system integrators seen as “ideal” for the offering.
Scalytics
Scalytics is attempting to ramp up the reach of its federated AI learning system with new features, a partner channel initiative, and the opening of a new European headquarters.
The Miami-headquartered company has just released Scalytics Connect v1.2.0, designed to help organisations achieve “transparent, scalable, and efficient machine learning,” while maintaining the “highest standards of data privacy and security,” says the provider.
Scalytics’ mission is to become the “leading framework” for federated and explainable AI, “empowering everyone to build secure, scalable, and transparent machine learning systems.”
“Focus on developing real-time AI applications, while we handle the infrastructure and complex integrations for you,” is the Scalytics promise.
Scalytics CEO and co-founder Alexander Alten said: “We are providing the foundation for secure, scalable and transparent AI, and federated learning for enterprises. We already have NTT Data as a startup discovery partner, and Google Cloud as a development partner for our SaaS offer.”
Alten told the IT Press Tour that new European headquarters were about to go live in Malta. “We are looking for system integrators and managed service providers across Europe to take on Scalytics Connect,” he said. The Scalytics Partner Program aims to help partners to deliver secure, compliant AI solutions that meet the growing demand for enterprise AI and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities.
Partners can integrate Scalytics’ decentralised data processing and AI functionalities into their offerings, with the promise of reducing their operational costs, and ensuring compliance with data regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and the EU AI Act.
ProxySQL
ProxySQL, a database acceleration system, is aiming to increase its revenues x10 within the next 12 months, as a result of expanding its channel ecosystem and adopting a full-scale cloud marketing strategy.
ProxySQL was founded in Malta in 2014 and has a virtual presence across Europe and the US. Its mission is to solve MySQL and PostgreSQL database “scalability challenges”.
The company has won infrastructure component business from large Nasdaq and S&P 500-listed companies, “proving the solution’s reliability and scalability”, says the firm.
Jesmar Cannaò, chief operating officer and co-founder at ProxySQL, said: “We are committed to providing open source solutions, and make money from selling services and support. We have around 40 customers worldwide, and a typical enterprise contract would generate around $45,000.”
Cannaò said the company was now building up its ecosystem through resellers, system integrators and cloud service providers, and was aiming for total sales of around $20m within 12 months from now – a big jump from the current sub-$2m revenue it currently generates.
“We’re only clicks away from our revenue target, cloud is the key,” Cannaò said. “We have previously mainly been a technical company, but we are increasing our marketing efforts, becoming more social and attending more events to drive our message home.”
Indexima
French company Indexima wants to help enterprises and service providers get quicker business intelligence from their Snowflake data lake platforms.
To do this, it launched Indexima 2.0 this year, and is now setting its sights on supporting Databricks data lake systems in the future too.
Indexima says it enables quick decision-making from Snowflake using its own algorithm to create an “aggregation layer,” supported by a business intelligence AI assistant.
Nicolas Korchia, CEO and founder, says: “Indexima is a unique data software that leverages ML and AI to solve the performance, cost, and agility dilemma of analytics.”
The technology uses a columnar data storage format, organising data by columns instead of rows, which is effective for analytical queries that tend to access only a subset of columns in a dataset. A columnar format delivers good data compression and faster scanning.
Indexima first sets itself up as a proxy to Snowflake. After a few minutes, it automatically creates a set of “dynamic tables” displaying the key information to the business user from a query.
Indexima’s performance depends on the size of the datasets queried and the frequency of its use, as it learns from the types of queries being made and the types of information contained in the datasets.
At the IT Press Tour in Valletta, Korchia said: “The performance of using Indexima can be 100 times faster, and it can be cheaper to use Snowflake as a result, and there are no development costs.”
Korchia says Snowflake is a “strategy partner” and involved as a “leads generation accelerator”, as well as being a “deal influencer” in its marketplace.
Korchia added that technology partners included MicroStrategy, Tableau, Looker, Power BI, Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Cloudera.
The cost of using the technology is based on the number of queries and the number of dynamic tables loaded per month. There are free, regular, business, and enterprise versions of the product available.
More from the IT Press Tour to follow...
