Xeround
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Cloud database software |
| Founded | 2005 |
| Founder | Sharon Barkai, Gilad Zlotkin |
| Defunct | May 15, 2013 |
| Fate | Discontinued services |
| Headquarters | Bellevue, Washington , United States |
Area served | Cloud computing customers worldwide |
Key people | Gilad Zlotkin (Founder), Sharon Barkai (Founder), Razi Sharir (CEO from 2009) |
| Products | Cloud-based MySQL-compatible database service |
| Website | xeround |
Xeround was a provider of cloud database software, established in 2005 by Sharon Barkai and Gilad Zlotkin, and discontinued its services in May 2013. Zlotkin, who previously held a research fellowship at MIT Sloan, had founded five other startups, including Radview (NASDAQ:RDVW). In 2006, the Israeli financial publication Globes recognized Xeround as one of the most promising emerging companies in Israel.
Initially focusing on telecommunications companies such as T-Mobile, Xeround broadened its scope in 2009 by introducing a MySQL interface, thereby making its solution applicable to more than 12 million MySQL-based applications. This offering allowed MySQL users to scale their databases and maintain high availability on cloud infrastructures like Amazon EC2. By the time of its beta launch, around 2,000 organizations were utilizing Xeround’s cloud database service. The company announced general availability in June 2011. Industry experts observed that Xeround’s support for MySQL positioned it strongly within the cloud database sector.
On May 1, 2013, Xeround notified its paying clients about the impending shutdown, requiring them to migrate their data before services ended on May 15, 2013.
Product
Xeround delivered a cloud-based database solution built upon the open source version of MySQL (owned by Oracle). It tackled the challenges associated with operating databases in cloud environments by ensuring high availability and facilitating scalability as data volume and throughput grew. By managing databases directly in the cloud, Xeround allowed applications to scale seamlessly without relying on a local MySQL server. As an in-memory distributed database system, it supported data volumes up to 50 GB and offered a no-downtime service level agreement (SLA). Its pricing model was usage-based, charging per Gigabyte per hour, with extra costs applied for significant data transfers.
The platform was compatible with several cloud providers such as Amazon EC2, RackSpace, and Heroku, with intentions to expand support to additional vendors. By March 2011, Xeround was distinguished by its multi-cloud compatibility, enabling customers to avoid vendor lock-in through effortless migration of databases across different cloud environments.
Although it presented a MySQL front end, Xeround’s backend architecture employed a proprietary NoSQL distributed system spanning multiple physical nodes, overcoming conventional MySQL scalability constraints. The core cloud database technology was proprietary software.
On May 1, 2013, Xeround declared it would terminate its services entirely by May 15, 2013.
Company timeline
- 2005 - Xeround is established by Sharon Barkai and Gilad Zlotkin; secures $6.5 million in Series A funding while initially focusing on distributed database solutions for telecom operators.
- 2006 - Named among Israel’s most promising startups by the financial newspaper Globes.
- 2008 - Raises $16 million in Series B financing.
- 2009 - Razi Sharir takes over as CEO; company shifts strategy toward providing a cloud database service featuring a MySQL front-end.
- 2010 - Releases beta version of its cloud-based database offering.
- 2011 - Announces general availability of its cloud database product and obtains an additional $13.3 million through two funding rounds.
- 2013 - Xeround discontinues operations.
Competitors and alternatives
Xeround's primary rivals consist of prominent cloud service providers offering database solutions, including Amazon's Relational Database Service and Salesforce's Database.com. Additional well-known cloud database platforms encompass Microsoft Azure SQL Database, NimbusDB, ClearDB, ParAccel, along with NoSQL key-value databases such as Amazon SimpleDB, Google Cloud Datastore, Couchbase Server, and Cloudant.
As an alternative, organizations may choose to manage their own databases by installing software on cloud infrastructure like Amazon EC2, thereby avoiding the use of managed cloud database services.