Last week I completed the Continuent Tungsten Solutions Training in London!

I spent two full days with eight of our customers and our host Chris Parker, one of Continuent’s Customer Success Directors, listening and learning, doing exercises, and getting to know a range of DBAs and System Engineers working in industries like telecom and e-commerce!

Chris did an incredible job guiding us and fielding questions on MySQL database management with Tungsten Clustering – I feel so lucky I got to do this – it was so fun!!

First we went through an install of a simple three-node cluster using allotted AWS ec2 instances. We created the directories and database users and got the Tungsten …

Those who build SaaS know that you’re actually providing an experience. You’re building long-term relationships and aiming for recurring revenue. Therefore, your product must be flexible, resilient, and consistent.

Many companies find it hard to take time, acquire the right ingredients, and design truly great software from the bottom-up. This is understandable given how fast the SaaS industry moves.

But firstly, who am I to be talking about this subject? My education was in Economics and Complex Systems, and I’ve been fortunate to gain exposure to various IT trends and tools working almost a decade mostly in Tech. I started interviewing customers at Continuent (majority SaaS) over five years ago, and I have listened to a number of …

With growing development and support costs as well as the need to maintain a sustainable business, it became apparent that maintaining the OSS release of Tungsten Replicator (TR) just wasn’t viable. Earlier this year we decided to close it down, instead focusing our efforts on improving and developing its commercial release whilst also growing our flagship commercial product, Tungsten Clustering.

For many businesses, Open Source Software (OSS) is still a very viable solution in many use cases, and I’m sure it will continue to be so for a long time, but I wanted to explore whether an OSS solution really is as free as the $0 price tag suggests.  In this blog I explore just that..

The hidden costs of OSS

Over the last few weeks I stumbled …

Great SaaS – starts with great software. My company has been working on this mission since 2004.

It took a few years to get our solution right – to offer a geo-distributed MySQL database backend for billion-dollar businesses. And it took a few more years to polish it.

Today, we continue to improve it day-in, day-out.

But there is no doubt the patience and perseverance pays off:

While the number of Tungsten-clustered databases in-production is in the thousands, we average only one (1) new support request per day, and, because of this, we provide an average response time less than three (3) minutes.

Not enough is said about the people and values behind great software; so that’s what I want to talk about here. Continuent is an agile, globally-distributed, remote team that is much greater than the sum of its parts. Our software helps global enterprises …