Company overview: DB4Objects
DB4Objects was incorporated in 2004 but has a software history going back to 2000 when Karl Rosenberger began the coding. Christof Wittig is the President and the company has a worldwide staff of 20 people. The company's gross revenue in its first year of business is roughly $1M and has 10,000 members in its registered user community. The company is funded in part by angel investors that Wittig met while attending the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Revenue emphasis is primarily on licensing the database product which accounts for 80% of the revenue. Annual support contracts account for the 20% balance. The true focus of the company is on product sales and the OEM business service is the only means of achieving licensing.
DB4Objects biggest challenge
Wittig says that his biggest challenge is to educate the industry that object oriented databases are not dead or lagging and that DB4Objects offers an entirely new angle for providing zero maintenance embeddable database solutions. In the past, commercial offerings of object oriented databases such as Versant and ObjectStore offered performance but were expensive and complicated to manage. Object relational mapping solutions for relational databases such as Toplink and Hibernate bridged the object oriented languages with relational databases but incurred a performance penalty for Java and C# users.
DB4Objects touts its top position in the PolePosition open source database benchmark as evidence of its suitability in high performance embedded solutions.
Wittig says that although DB4Objects competes with SleepyCat and IBM's Cloudscape, his biggest competitors are developers who will often write their own database persistence. Wittig sites as competitive advantages the ability to provide a "One-Line-of-Code-Database" which provides substantial performance over relational database performance. Its 400k footprint and automatic schema versioning are also advantages for embedded solutions such as cell phones and PDAs.
DB4Objects uses the standard dual-use GPL license for its product. It recommends the commercial license when developers compile commercial software using db4o, if non-GPL'ed software contains specific references to the db4o software, or if non-GPL'ed software requires db4o to work.
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