TmaxSoft, whose value proposition is feature parity and a better price than database management incumbents, opened a Canadian office in January, and is actively looking to add strong partners in Canada.

TmaxSoft, a South Korean-based database vendor which targets Oracle with feature comparability and a lower price point, has significantly expanded its North American presence in this last year. This included the establishment of a Canadian office in Mississauga. While the company has a direct sales capacity, and sells with a hybrid channel model, it is very much in recruitment mode for quality partners in Canada.

While TmaxSoft was founded in 1997, they sold exclusively in the Asian market until 2006, and while they have nominally been in North America for a decade, they really only began a serious drive here in 2015, when they established a U.S. corporate headquarters in Chicago. The Canadian office was set up in January 2016, with Satya Sarangi as CEO and President of TmaxSoft Canada Inc.

“There is a lot of similarity between Canada in the U.S from a customer perspective as far as relational database management is concerned,” said Sarangi, whose resume includes a stint at Oracle as well as Intel and IBM. “The issues are common, particularly cost and ones related to virtualization and active/ active clustering. We are here as an alternative provider, to provide an option to a lot of pain from being locked into one or two database vendors.”

TmaxSoft’s strategy is very much based on targeting Oracle, matching it feature by feature, including active/active clustering, to facilitate seamless migrations from Oracle. Head to head, TmaxSoft is also considerably cheaper, helped along by a licensing model favoring customers who deploy databases in a virtual environment. Unlike Oracle, TmaxSoft allow a licensee to license only a subset of their virtual environment, which may require covering only 20 to 30 per cent of CPUs instead of 100 per cent.

While Sarangi said TmaxSoft’s greatest value is the cost, he also emphasized that their value proposition goes beyond simply price.

“Cost is just one aspect,” he said. “Having a positive experience is also critical, as is bringing in innovative features. 45 per cent of our revenues goes to R&D. We also don’t have a lot of products like Oracle does, or IBM or Microsoft. That means that we spend a lot of time innovating and improving them. Our Tibero 6 enterprise database is a great solution for what the market is looking for. We have demonstrated the capabilities of our product. Gartner says good things about us. It’s enterprise class, a low-cost database with high availability and high security. Quality-wise we are at par if not better.”

TmaxSoft’s overall North American go-to-market model is a hybrid one, and that applies to Canada as well. Sarangi said about 40 per cent of their business here is direct, and 60 per cent channel, but they are aggressively looking to expand their partner base.

“We are highly dependent on the channel, and we want to partner with them,” he said. “We don’t have a big team for services. We are good at selling licenses, but we want to have VAR and SI partners look after the deployments and take care of the services delivery.”

While disgruntled ex-Oracle partners are clearly at the top of TmaxSoft’s partner prospect list, Sarangi said that they are casting a broader net than that.

“We have an open mind,” he said. We are looking for people who can add value. If they have data migration capabilities in particular, we like to partner with those folks. We train partners to make sure they do migration properly, but the ones we want generally have those capabilities already, so it doesn’t take long to get them up to speed.”

TmaxSoft has a channel program and Sarangi said there are great incentives for the right partners.

“I would encourage partners who think they have the capability to add value to contact us, and to have discussions with us,” he said.