Startup City: DB4Objects Takes A Run At The Object Database MarketStartup City: DB4Objects Takes A Run At The Object Database Market

Nearly a dozen commercial software companies--including CA, Objectivity, Ontos, Poet, Progress Software, and Versant--offered object-oriented databases in the 1990s, with little success. DB4Objects is making another run at this market. What's changed? Object-oriented languages and open source development have taken root.
-- John Foley DB4Objects HEADQUARTERS: San Mateo, Calif.

PRODUCT: DB4O, an open source object-oriented database

PRINCIPALS: Christof Wittig, president and CEO; Carl Rosenberger, chief software architect; Anne Dorman, CFO; Anat Gafni, VP engineering; Nik Wekwerth, VP of marketing and sales

INVESTORS: Mark Leslie, Vinod Khosla, Jerry Fiddler, Asset Management

CUSTOMERS: BMW, Boeing, Bosch, Intel, Ricoh, Seagate

MARKET DB4O is aimed at Java and .Net developers who need a database that can be built into devices and applications. It's used in Clarity Medical Systems' retinal imaging system, for example. Wittig puts the object database market at $50 million; it could reach $1 billion over the next three or four years, he says, driven by adoption of embedded databases in mobile devices and cars. OPPORTUNITY For developers, the benefit of an object database is simplicity. "One line of code" is all it takes to store an object, according to DB4Objects. That translates into shorter development times and lower costs. For customers, DB4O requires "zero administration" as an embedded database. Flexibility and a small footprint are added benefits: DB4O supports Java and .Net natively and takes up only 600 Kbytes of memory. BUSINESS MODEL Licensing costs can be as low as $1 per database, depending on the application. Revenue comes from volume. Ricoh, for example, plans to use DB4O in its photocopiers. BRAINS Rosenberger is DB40's original developer. CEO Wittig was founder and CEO of Apsis Software, a German company specializing in project cost management software, which merged with Conject in 2002. The heavy lifting on DB40 is done by 88 developers around the world, about a quarter of whom are paid by the company. Investors Leslie (founding CEO of Veritas), Khosla (founding CEO of Sun), and Fiddler (founding CEO of Wind River) bring software industry cred to DB4O. TIMELINE