Splice Machine, a company that provides a Hadoop relational database management system (RDBMS), announced yesterday that it would be moving its management system from private beta to public beta.  The company will be offering its database to download for free and it is a fully supported commercial product.

“Our go-to-market strategy is a freemium model,” said Monte Zweben, the CEO and cofounder of Splice. “Anyone can develop on Splice Machine and essentially do so for free, and when they put it into operation and derive value out of it, then they would license the platform on a per node basis, very similar to the Hadoop pricing schemes from the Hadoop distribution companies.”

Splice’s software is designed to help organizations overcome Hadoop’s batch analysis limitations by using their transactional SQL database on Hadoop that can run “operational applications” and real-time analytics. Splice’s target customers are IT companies that are using traditional databases like Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL, IBM DB2, MySQL, but are confronted with performance limitations due to large amounts of data.

Companies that are facing difficulties with the volume and velocity of data have two options to overcome the influx of data – either scaling up on hardware from their existing database vendor or scaling out on commodity servers. Splice claims to offer both solutions: 1) they enable companies to grow from gigabytes to petabytes by scaling out commodity hardware, and 2) they do not need to change their code.

Splice currently has 15 charter customers across a range of industries, including digital marketing, telecom, and high-tech.

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