Published on the 10/03/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
An Australian retailer keen to speed applications development was the first customer for Delphix when it launched its data-as-a-service system – but since then it has proved a slow burn in A/NZ…
One year after launching Australian operations, data-as-a-service pioneer Delphix acknowledges it has only a few local customers (only one of which, Bupa, has been named), and none yet signed in New Zealand. But it believes that there are significant opportunities for growth as enterprises work out how the technology can be deployed to speed applications development and data sharing.
Delphix captures and stores on a virtual appliance a copy of production application data, including ongoing changes, from enterprise applications such as SAP, Oracle, SharePoint or PeopleSoft. From this single data footprint, Delphix can deliver virtual copies of that data on demand for application development, reporting, troubleshooting, or other purposes, without any data duplication or movement of actual data. To ensure data remains in synch it then distributes any data changes to the teams using the data.
The company claims its self-service approach offers significant speed and cost savings over legacy approaches requiring IT operations to get involved creating cuts of data for different team requirements.
Company founder and CEO Jedidah Yueh, who was in Australia last week, said that applications development in most enterprises was “archaic” and relied on data from production environments being parceled up by IT staff and sent to development or testing environments. Delphix, he said, allowed data to be virtualised, and then dialed up when required.
Yueh said that by making production data more readily available to application development and testing teams it should be possible for most large enterprises to double their project returns, while reducing IT costs, complexity and wait times.
“Companies are facing friction between IT development and IT operations. Data-as-a-service fills the gaps for the application teams,” he said.
Yueh is a serial entrepreneur with a history of experimenting with data having formerly established data deduplication company Avamar which was sold to EMC in 2006 for US$165 million.
Delphix last year appointed Chris Poulos as vice president of Asia Pacific, based in Sydney. Poulos said that the company was building its local operations and would shortly have a team of 10-15 people in the region, though it will leverage partners for sales.
