WANdisco launches new SQL solution engineered with IBM

WANdisco has launched a new joint engineered solution with IBM to support relational database technology for the first time, significantly expanding its addressable market, it announced on Tuesday.

The AIM-traded firm said the IBM Db2 Big SQL solution was jointly engineered between IBM and WANdisco to extend the capability of IBM Big Replicate - IBM's product name for WANdisco Fusion - to support scenarios where customers were looking to take advantage of hybrid cloud.

It explained that SQL is a language used in programming, and designed for managing data held in a relational database management system.

The company said it was the first time that WANdisco had supported relational database technology, building upon existing ‘Hadoop’ solutions to include SQL applications and private cloud.

It described IBM Db2 Big SQL as a hybrid, high performance SQL engine for Hadoop, with support for a variety of data sources including HDFS, RDBMS, NoSQL databases, object stores and WebHDFS.

Big SQL offered low latency queries, security, SQL compatibility, and Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) and federation capabilities, WANdisco explained.

That would enable organisations to derive value from enterprise data, allowing data scientists, business analysts, and database managers to access data where it resided, scale with cloud-ready flexibility, and improve query performance with numerous concurrent users.

WANdisco noted that its relationship with IBM “strengthened significantly” in 2018, as it increased its royalty percentage to 50% from 30%, and agreed a guaranteed annual royalty commitment.

New customers with IBM were secured in insurance, banking, telecommunications and with the US Government, and on 27 December the company won a three-year contract through IBM with an unnamed major American managed healthcare company, valued at around $0.7m in royalties.

“This co-engineered SQL solution with IBM is an exciting breakthrough for WANdisco as this is the first time that our technology has been applied to SQL data,” said chairman and chief executive officer David Richards.

“This launch also represents a significant advancement of our relationship with a key partner and the scope of our addressable market in IBM's channel.

“WANdisco's unique technology presents great opportunity to collaborate with partners to address novel data requirements that previously have not been possible to meet.”