SingleStore: The Data-intensive Era is Now

Big, Fast Data
Enterprise-scale companies face two significant data challenges today: ever-growing size of datasets and intense pressure to get from data to insight to stay competitive. SingleStore sits at the intersection between big data and fast data. Its platform, SingleStoreDB, is purpose built to deliver maximum performance for both transactional (OLTP) and analytical (OLAP) workloads in a single unified database. With their technologies, SingleStore is delivering better business outcomes for household name customers including American Express, Comcast, GE, Kellogg’s, and Uber.

DTC first invested in SingleStore in the company’s Series E in late 2020. And then, Chris Hillock and Dan Fitzpatrick of the DTC Portfolio Development team got to work.

DTC + SingleStore
“As a startup with category-defining technologies, there are so many potential partnership and    alliance possibilities that it’s more important to know where not to spend your time,” said David Evert, director of partner alliances for SingleStore.

Joining SingleStore in 2021 with a mandate that included building a strong technical and sales partnership with Dell, David shared candidly that navigating new alliances with a Fortune 100 company can take a significant amount of time. Meeting the DTC PortDev team turned out to be a vital, cycle-saving introduction.

“From day one, Chris and Dan had a crisp understanding of our technologies and how they might complement Dell’s strategies in storage,” offered David. Setting a regular cadence of collaboration calls, David worked with the DTC team to create a 30k foot strategic view of what a Dell partnership could look like. Then, together, they brought that strategic plan down to a 100 ft view of what tactically needed to happen today to have something in the market with Dell in less than a year’s time.

In May 2021, the DTC PortDev team began facilitating strategic alignment workshops between SingleStore and the Dell Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) product management, engineering, and marketing teams. In these meetings, it became clear that SingleStoreDB’s differentiated technology could help accelerate activities like data ingest, reduce query latency, and increase concurrency for data intensive apps. Combined with Dell solutions, customers could soon have a performance scale-out solution with real-time data insights that are required of a modern digital ecosystem.

Intrigued by the potential here, the Dell database team ran a functional proof of concept (POC) to solidly encouraging results. The lead engineer on the POC noted, “A query we use to demonstrate 13GB/s of throughput on a small cluster running industry standard technology takes about 12 seconds to scan 13 billion records and aggregate the result. The same query runs without any syntax changes on SingleStore in 0.12 seconds!”

From that POC, the Dell ISG database engineering team dove in with SingleStoreDB to create a Dell Validated Design (DVD) – integrated solutions that are stringently tested and documented by Dell engineering – documentation along with a collaborative white paper on validating SingleStoreDB running on Dell PowerEdge R940xa and PowerFlex hardware.

With a Dell Validated Design in hand, the DTC PortDev team connected SingleStoreDB to several additional key stakeholders, including Dell’s OEM senior leadership team. After a series of technical deep-dive sessions between teams, SingleStore announced their selection by Dell’s OEM Engineered Solutions group to develop a co-engineered solution and bring it to market.

Beyond working to develop joint-product and route to market opportunities, the DTC PortDev team drove exposure for SingleStoreDB’s technologies by introducing them to more than 65 sales teams at Dell, leading to traction on the sales front with a number of Fortune 500 customers.

Zero to Market Together in < 18 Months
In fewer than 18 short months since the initial DTC investment, SingleStoreDB has gone from an initial functional proof of concept with one team at Dell to engagements across several product areas, multiple joint solution designs, and a significant, active sales pipeline. Believing that in this data-intensive era this is just the start for SingleStore and Dell, the DTC PortDev team continues to hold regular meetings with the company to drive conversations with stakeholders across both organizations.

“As investors and operators, DTC has engaged in a remarkable and outsized way by making high quality customer introductions and championing co-engineered solutions with Dell product teams,” said Raj Verma, CEO, SingleStore. “In everything they do, they’re 100% behind SingleStore’s mission to deliver the “now” in database technologies to customers and the world at large.”