Cockroach Labs CEO: Being Mid-Sized Doesn’t Mean You Don’t Have Big Database Needs

Cockroach Labs' co-founder and CEO, Spencer Kimball, speaks on how the company can deliver enterprise-sized database capabilities to midmarket organizations.

Despite a name that may make some squeamish, Cockroach Labs has made quite a footprint in the database space. The company, which provides cloud native distributed SQL database solutions, was named a customer’s choice in 2023 by Gartner. Although its top three competitors, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle Database have a larger share of the relational database market, Cockroach Labs has managed to achieve 0.13 percent market share, according to one report, since it was founded in 2015.

Co-founder and CEO, Spencer Kimball is a former Google employee, and — fun fact — he is the creator of GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program). He created the freeware image editor while he was in college.

Kimball recently spoke with MES Computing about what Cockroach Labs does and what it can offer mid-sized companies.

While the New York-based company’s business generates 80 percent of its business from enterprises including gaming companies, financial services, and health care. About 20 percent of customers are small-to-mid-sized businesses.

“We actually have a pretty healthy business there,” Kimball said about the midmarket. “We have a cloud platform which is self-service … and we offer a free version of Cockroach.”

“We’ve built an operational database, so this is in contrast to something like Snowflake, which is an analytics database. So, it's all the metadata typically, in your business that you need to store.”

Cockroach offers a distributed architecture which provides high availability for businesses when there are outages in their datacenters or with their cloud providers.

“We have massive database clusters and … customers need them to get even bigger, like 10 times bigger, 100 times. That's what their growth plans are. And then one interesting additional capability that we bring to the market is we have this very distributed architecture which allows you to get that kind of resilience because you're not just running the database in one location, you're running it across facilities,” he explained.

“Most of our big customers, they're very concerned with those regional outages. So, they actually run the database across regions.”

While that sort of regional database redundancy may be overkill for many mid-sized organizations (though not necessarily all), Kimball said there is value in Cockroach for the midmarket.

With the free version of Cockroach, “we manage it for you. There's a free entry point and then you pay for what you use beyond that,” he said.

Midsized businesses, “would use our cloud platform. That would be perfect … because you don’t have to learn how to run Cockroach,” he added.

“[Customers may say] I'm going to use AWS and I want this many nodes and I want them to be this big and have this much storage and you might start off and you're only using a small fraction of that, but you're paying for all the capacity that you're not using … so you kind of have this mismatch between what you've allocated and what you're actually using,” Kimball said.

“If you use our cloud platform, you can just go full serverless, so you're basically going to get charged for exactly what you use so [if] you're in development, you're just kind of testing things. Your cost is probably going to be free for that because that will be under our free tier. Then you start to scale it up, you get it into production, then you're going to be charged for exactly what you're using.”

“For many smaller businesses with lots of different use cases ... this is an incredible option in terms of the cost. You get … this sort of gold standard and reliability and if that needs to get very big, it can get very big and you don't have to rescale it and add nodes or anything. It just gets as big as it needs to get, right you need to.

“Charge for what you use, so that's a that's a huge win. We actually are great for the mid-market and the right way to think about that is you use the cloud platform and get the kind of capabilities some of the world's biggest businesses and big banks are using for their state-of-the-art stuff.”

“I mean, just because it's a mid-sized company … doesn't mean they [don’t] have a lot big database needs, too. Some of these businesses are handling a lot of transactions and have a lot of data needs.”

Kimball said that Cockroach employs a direct sales model.

“Just go to cockroachlabs.com and go to the cloud platform. We've made it extremely easy to get started,” he said.

“We spent a lot of time on the individual developer. While most of our sales efforts and our marketing is geared towards the enterprise segment, there's a very welcoming path [for] mid-size companies and startups.”