HyperRoll: High speed addition

Before taking up his present post, HyperRoll CEO Yossi Caspi founded SoftCubes, a data storage consulting firm. He became involved in data storage when he was the Business Intelligence technology manger at Oracle, where he managed the On Line Analytical Process (OLAP) products department and was a senior advisor to the company.

"We realized one of the factors that dramatically affected connections between technologies was the painful area defined as 'totaling'," said Caspi. "A database by definition is a mass of information, which continuously comes in and is developed, layer by layer. Every enterprise ultimately wants reports on transactions made in a defined period, rather than simple updates on current events. A system of data summarizing is needed that can be presented in reports."

In order to speed up this process, a preliminary step, called 'summary tables,' is undertaken. Groups of data are organized according to various criteria into a kind of index so a search engine will be able to access the material

This need for rapidly produced summaries gave birth to a start-up named HyperRoll. Aplicatek provided three employees, and SoftCubes provided two. Aplicatek, founded by Dr. Reuven Bakalash, creates work environments for resource-rich applications that can be run on supercomputers or specially adapted PCs using multiple processors and proper computing programs. HyperRoll became an independent entity in early 2000.

In January 2000, HyperRoll raised $1.6 million from Microdent, Eitan Wertheimer's investment company. In October 2000, it received $1 million during a bridging round from eXseed Technology Investments. Caspi says, "We originally planned to seek a larger investment, but preferred immediate financing in order to continue the capital-raising process."

"Ultimately, what matters to a CEO is the bottom line. How much did the company earn, how much did it lose, and how much profit it made," says Caspi. "In order to obtain this data, he needs to go through the entire data totaling process. When I met Dr. Bakalash, I asked him if he could substantially shorten the calculation process, which was then 13 hours. He said yes, and we decided to go for it."

Removing the time factor

Data summary varies between sectors. A cellular company wants total calls, a bank totals its financial transactions, etc. But in the end, it is always a basic addition process. HyperRoll claims its program can speed up the process.

HyperRoll cofounder and VP sales and marketing Gabby Rubin says, "The manager's first consideration is time. He knows the lengthier the time period for which he wants a tally, the longer it takes. In our method, although the time needed to complete the summary is derived from the size of the database, we can do the calculations much faster, thereby removing the time factor from the equation."

"The manager then asks himself, 'Why shouldn't we enter the figures from other branches?' This would give him a broader picture, and it's made possible by the speeded-up calculation process."

In addition to speeding up calculations, businesses want to obtain the most up-to-date picture possible about all of the company's activities. One solution to the update problem is to install software that can continuously monitor the database's activities, and warn managers as needed (such as when sales in a particular region are weakening). HyperRoll's solution assumes that if a manager can obtain all the data (the summaries) at the end of each day, he can make better decisions, based on a comprehensive picture.

"Globes": Do you have competitors?

Rubin: "We don't consider database companies or high-speed hardware suppliers competitors, because we integrate their systems, rather than competing against them. As for direct competitors, there's a private US company, K-Systems, that offers a proprietary database solution, whereas we integrate with existing databases."

"Another company, Disk, takes a questionnaire formulated by the user, and tries to direct it to the location in the database containing the relevant information. We found an article of theirs saying they were limited to databases of 500 million entries. We have already exceeded 2.5 billion entries."

"Indirect competition is provided by programs such as BMC Software's Patrol, which handles navigating databases and decentralizing overloads, rather than handling the data itself."

Selling by word of mouth

The price of each HyperRoll  is $60,000-70,000, and the company is relying on word of mouth to make sales. Rubin says, "Each department satisfied with our product recommends it to another. Each satisfied company recommends it to its subsidiaries, etc. We already have a good rate of sales."

The next stage, which the company is already working on, is to create products adapted to particular industries, rather than its current generic product.

HyperRoll's development center, which employs 17 of the company's 24 personnel, is based in the Beer Sheva suburb of Omer. It also employs students from Ben Gurion University of the Negev. The company's headquarters is in Santa Clara, California. HyperRoll is now focusing on the US market, and it plans to enter the Asian financial institutions market, followed by Europe.

HyperRoll reports that its customers include Nortel Networks, Avaya, and MasterCard. It is preparing to complete a financing round involving a strategic partner from the data storage field whose identity Caspi declines to reveal.

Data storage? What's the relationship between this sort of company and a speeded-up data calculation engine?

Caspi: "That company believes that when our application proves to customers that it can rapidly handle enormous databases, they'll exploit it to buy more storage space, something they heretofore were deterred from doing because of the time needed to summarize the data. That company will be quite happy selling more data storage space."

Published by Israel's Business Arena on 17 October 2001