"Through our partnership with IBM, we can focus our start-up company resources on high-value innovation while still having a worldwide sales and marketing impact."
— Dr. John Busch, President and Chief Executive Officer, Schooner Information Technology
The Company
The vision of Schooner's founders, and mission of the company, is to provide technology solutions that transform datacenters in Web 2.0 and cloud computing. With this in mind, Schooner has created a new architecture for today's data-intensive businesses. By integrating advances in enterprise-class flash memory, multi-core processors, low-latency interconnect, and highly optimized data access and caching applications, Schooner provides fully optimized appliance solutions that address the fundamental issues of scaling and power consumption in the datacenter.
Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, Schooner was founded in 2007 and develops solutions that are fast, scalable, cost-effective and green. Schooner's solutions are the only datacenter appliances that deeply integrate middleware with advances in flash memory, multi-core processors, and low-latency interconnects.
The Market
The performance issues, massive data growth and energy inefficiencies associated with Web 2.0 and data-intensive enterprises are crippling businesses. It was seeing these pain points that led Schooner to partner with IBM in creating and marketing a new generation of data access application appliances. Specifically, Schooner appliances address the needs for cost reduction, faster data access, easier scaling, and simpler management in the MySQL and Memcached markets.
Customers today are moving away from integrating component technologies in the datacenter towards fully-integrated appliances that effectively exploit advances in multi-core processors, flash memory, and low-latency interconnect technologies. Schooner appliances address this market opportunity because they are 100 percent compatible with existing client applications and eliminate the need for enterprises to integrate component technologies.
The optimized appliances can replace traditional servers by a ratio of up to eight to one, providing immediate capex savings from lower hardware costs, and ongoing opex savings of more than 60 percent by cutting expenses for power, cooling, rackspace, network connections and administration. Aside from cost reduction, the appliances also support revenue generation by enabling enterprises to launch new revenue-producing business opportunities based on rapid access to terabyte-scale data.
The IBM strategic advantage
Under the guidance of the IBM Venture Capital Group, Schooner partnered with the IBM System x group for server technology, co-marketing opportunities, and co-branded sales. By integrating Schooner's technology with one of the most utilized server solutions available on the market today, Schooner has the opportunity to quickly penetrate the market.
The Smarter Planet initiative also made IBM a particularly attractive partner for the launch of Schooner's first products. Schooner's appliances have been designed to support the IBM Smarter Planet initiative and its mission to provide dynamic infrastructure solutions that offer more flexible, energy efficient and cost-effective IT options for businesses.
"By leveraging the next-generation System x platform and IBM's world-class manufacturing, marketing, sales, and support infrastructure, Schooner was able to quickly develop leading-edge products and effectively bring them to market. Through our partnership with IBM, we can focus our start-up resources on high-value innovation while still having a worldwide sales and marketing impact", said Dr. John Busch.
The venture capital firm
Schooner is funded by CMEA Capital and Redpoint Ventures. Jim Watson of CMEA arranged the introduction to IBM Venture Capital Group, who acted as Schooner's sponsor within IBM. Between the energy and cost saving benefits of Schooner and the broad customer base of IBM, he thought the partnership would be a perfect match.
"IBM's Venture Capital Group invested time to explore synergies between Schooner and IBM, and aggressively drove the discussions across business and technical leaders. As a result of this sponsorship, a breakthrough technology solution will now be brought to market that will transform datacenters in Web 2.0 and cloud computing", said Jim Watson, Managing General Partner, CMEA Capital.