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,” covering connection management to control database overloads, backend load reductions for optimized performance, traffic control to block unwanted queries, query routing and rewriting for “precision and flexibility”, and query caching to enhance efficiency.
From starting as a small open source project, and supporting various replication topologies such as Galera Cluster, Group Replication, and Aurora, the company has won infrastructure component business from large Nasdaq and S&P 500-listed companies, “proving its reliability and scalability,” says the firm.
The software can manage up to 1 million concurrent client connections. It consolidates connections into optimized backend queries, reducing MySQL and PostgreSQL loads.
It can handle thousands of servers in multi-region or multi-cloud architectures, and provides “seamless” traffic distribution and failover across nodes. Dynamic sharding and query routing enables intelligent routing to specific shards or replicas, allowing businesses to scale horizontally without significant application changes, we are told.
Firewall protection sees malicious queries and unauthorized access blocked, with fine-grained rules for users or IP-based restrictions, and automatic failover detection includes server health monitoring and the rerouting of traffic during failures. “This all ensures high availability without manual intervention,” says the provider.
Jesmar Cannaò, chief operating officer and co-founder at ProxySQL, said his firm competed against traditional load balancers like HAProxy and NGINX, and database-specific proxies like MySQL Router, MariaDB MaxScale, and pgBouncer, along with other emerging database management tools.
Speaking at last week’s IT Press Tour in Valletta, Malta, Cannaò 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.”
If that figure was simply replicated 40 times, the company would have sales below $2 million, at $1.8 million, but it’s not as much as that as some deployments are smaller than $45,000. However, 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 $20 million within 12 months from now.
Cannaò claimed the “behaviour” of large database platform providers, and “money issues” at smaller database providers, were helping to drive sales for ProxySQL, and demand for PostgreSQL solutions from developers was also helping. That “behaviour” mentioned included forcing customers to upgrade their databases when they didn’t need to, through ending support for older systems. ProxySQL can provide extended support for older databases affected, and help when newer, even upgraded ones, face deployment problems too.
“If we do what we’re promising to do, 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.”
