Just as our customers use our technology to understand the dynamics of their business based on recent data, I do the same to understand how Infobright is performing and to help guide us for the future. We measure success by the growth of our customer base and the growth of our community. We also work to continually improve our understanding of how our technology is being used, as this allows us to enhance the technology in ways that are of the most benefit to our users.

So, how are we doing? Infobright’s customer base grew 500% over the past year, to 120 paying customers. This included end users (60%) as well as ISVs and SaaS providers (40%) who embed our database in their application. It is great to see both segments taking advantage of our technology. During the same period, our open source software was downloaded 35,000 times, which included the integrated virtual machines we developed with our partners Pentaho, Jaspersoft, Talend and Actuate/BIRT.

The end user applications were heavily clustered around Web and Online Analytics tracking with a focus on understanding customer behavior on the web. We also continue to see the growth of application-specific data marts (see the Austin Energy case study as a great example). There is also continued interest and growth in using Infobright technology to analyze IT logs and telecom Call Detail Record data, to identify fraud or security issues, to understand and improve network performance, and other purposes.

One of the areas we are most excited about is Mobile Analytics. Mobile internet access and mobile advertising are growing at incredible rates throughout the world. We are seeing the early leaders in this market using Infobright to achieve very high performance against the large volumes of data they are capturing daily. Companies like Bango, the leader in mobile payments and mobile analytics who is using Infobright Enterprise Edition to make user data available to their customers within minutes of actions having occurred.

The IT and telecom network log analytics use cases are other important areas where Infobright is being used. In these cases the solution must deliver usage, performance and capacity analysis about hundreds to thousands of devices across an enterprise. ISVs and SaaS providers are storing the data in Infobright to enable fast, ad-hoc queries and reports. The data may include audit, activity logs or events being generated by routers, gateways, firewalls and servers of various types across an Enterprise. Again, like most other use cases we see, the need to analyze both high level trends as well as track activity down to the device level is the business requirement the ISV needs Infobright for. Tracking at the device level vs. just delivering summary trends is far more taxing on the database. Turns out the relational products in the market just cannot support the data size and performance SLAs Infobright is capable of at the low price point we deliver.

While looking back at 2009 feels good, the view into 2010 is even more interesting. We must always deliver increasing value to our community and to our paying customers. Our roadmap is full of important feature content for 2010.

You will see Infobright be much more transparent in 2010 about our plans. We will start posting and commenting on future releases and themes in March of this year. The release velocity will continue to be fast as a result of our Agile development process. We expect to drop 3-4 interim releases for every major release and at least two major releases in 2010.

Some of the major improvements this year will be:
• Continued SMP performance improvements without the need for complex hardware configurations or administrative effort
• Extending the “hit rate” of the Knowledge Grid which is when Infobright out-performs all other products on the market
• Better international support with UTF-8 extensions

Feel free to send me a note on any of my comments in the blog. I can be reached at mark.burton@infobright.com . We are always interested in hearing about how you are using Infobright ICE or IEE. Please tell me about your applications and use of Infobright.

We look forward to working with you and hearing from you in 2010.
Mark