[TechSparks Mumbai] How Scale Arc became the King of ‘database scalability’

Gaurav Gupta, VP of Scale Arc, kept the audience enthralled at the BSE in Dalal Street during TechSparks Mumbai last weekend.

Gaurav took us all through a roller coaster ride on what it takes to run a global company and how to overcome small and large roadblocks that may come our way.

Gaurav has been a startup guy for many years with Scale Arc being the fourth  startup that he has worked for. He has worked with startups in the US, CloudVelocity and another which was acquired by Cisco.

He believes that every startup has a unique and interesting story. Some startups have happy endings, some don’t but in the end they all have interesting journeys that we can all learn from.

Scale Arc’s journey

Scale Arc is a five-year-old startup headquartered in Santa Clara, USA, and with offices in Mumbai and Pune in India. The company is in the business of database scalability and performance.

Gaurav considers the company to be a mid stage startup, that is an enterprise B2B company. They have enterprise customers and make software to help companies scale their databases.

Scale Arc has received worldwide recognition from many publications such as ‘Forbes India’. MAPR rated Scale Arc as among the top 10 big data startups to watch out for.

They have also raised two rounds of funding; Series A was led by Nexus Venture Partners and Series B by Accel partners.

Dawn of the internet

In late 1990s when World Wide Web took off, the world saw many interesting dotcom companies coming on the web and a growth in the number of users, there was a need to scale so that millions of these users could use and access these services and shop online.

A concept of LoadBalancer for the web thus came up. There were some very successful companies in this field, which made sure that the web layer would be scalable and stable to all users.

Fast forward to present    

These days when users visit the websites of Google or Facebook or any of the other popular websites, they are not hitting a server but actually a bunch of proxy servers in the middle which is going to load balance your request to one of the servers that will process the users request.

As most of you know and accept that data or content is King, the volume of data is growing at an incredible pace and is stored in databases. Hence there needs to be similar solution for databases, to make them more scalable. Traditional database companies like Oracle and Microsoft are building bigger and better databases.

Then there is the NoSQL side that says that we could scale using a different kind of data store.

What Scale Arc is doing is keeping the existing relational databases intact and providing a plug and play proxy server so that users can scale their database without having to make modifications to the stack but at the same time get the benefit of scalability, better performance and availability.

Recognizing the need and starting up

Varun Singh and Uday Sawant were working for their company on a very large cluster of databases and there were fires that needed to be put out every other day. They had to do manual patching and keep servers and the website up and running. When the company launched something new, they would have the same problems all over again.

The founders recognised the need, and though this was no simple problem with an easy solution, they took up the challenge and started Scale Arc.

They pitched their idea to investors, who loved it and decided to fund them.

Initial pilot with friends and family 

The Scale Arc team started building their first generation product . Like almost all aspects of life, everyone needs a support system that would take care of us through thick and thin. Scale Arc reached out to their friends and family and told them about the product that they were working on.The team got a lot of support from their friends and family and were able to conduct successful trial, and pilot sessions with them where they got valuable feedback.

They were excited and ready to conquer the world.

Move to the US

As the company was in the B2B sector, trust plays an important role in building partnerships and getting customers on board.

As customers are investing their time and money in the company, they need a sense of assurance.

The US of A provides a really good platform for IP protection and brand values. So they decided to incorporate the company is the US, so that all their IP would be filed there and protected by US patent laws. 

The founding team felt that the time was right to go to the US and build the executive team, CEO, sales organisation, marketing and engineering team.

First customer    

Every startup strives to see their product in front of the customer and get feedback. For Scale Arc, their first customer was a big Facebook gaming company, which was facing all sorts of challenges.

Scale Arc pitched their product to them and the company liked the idea and decided to go ahead with it.

The D-day arrived and employees at all the Scale Arc offices were waiting eagerly for the result and see if they could handle the large traffic for the gaming company.

As soon as the switch was turned on and the traffic was diverted to Scale Arc, there was a meltdown. Scale Arc realized that they were not equipped to handle such a large surge in traffic. All their test runs were on a much smaller audience of friends and family.

Panic and first reactions

The field teams felt that this was it and that they would have to go and hand in their resumes for other jobs.

The Executives and CEO though had no place to hide. They had met their customer face to face and made promises and assurances; and failed.

Gaurav caught Scale Arcs best developer and told him, “Tumse na ho payega. It is an enterprise product, and failure is not an option we can afford.”

Though these were the initial first reactions of the team, they decided to troubleshoot their problems and come back with a solution.

Rebuilding and the defining moments

Back in the Scale Arc offices it was all hands on deck. Right from the CEO and founders to the receptionist, everyone was testing the product.

During all this everybody played a different role. The teams worked out of the office 24/7 trying to get things right.

The field team was trying to manage consumer expectation, customer support trying to help people through their problems, the engineering team was diagnosing the various problems and fixing them, and the Quality Assurance team was testing the product. The whole machinery was in motion.

When a company has a cohesive team that can work well with each other, miracles happen.

Within a few days the Scale Arc team had ironed out all their problems and then went back to the same customer.

This time, Scale Arc was very successful. The gaming company loved their product and appreciated the fact that the Scale Arc team was with them through thick and thin. Scale Arc was not filling the shoes of a vendor but those of a partner.

Scale Arc proved itself to be a company that is resilient. From an enterprise company’s point of view this is really important. The goal should be to help their customers succeed because their success leads to the company’s success as well, thus creating a snowball effect.

Scale Arc’s current clientele include global giants such as Microsoft, Dell.com, Tesla , Bookmyshow and many more.

Future plans

“Repeat this again on a bigger scale, grow and prove ourselves to be an industry, innovation and thought leader in this space,” concluded Gaurav Gupta on what the company was looking to do in the future.

A big thanks to all the sponsors and partners for supporting TechSparks 2014 – Sequoia Capital, AWS, Intel, DSOA, Verisign, Stanford Ignite, Target, Intuit, Brand Capital and Ola.