Tessell's Quest to Transform Enterprise Data Management

Bala Kuchibhotla, Co-Founder and CEO of Tessell, has spent his career working in databases and data management. 

Starting out as a kernel engineer at Versant, competing with Oracle on object-oriented databases, he subsequently moved to Oracle's Enterprise Manager Division.

By the time Bala left Oracle, his entrepreneurial vision had crystallised. In the same way that Google’s name has become synonymous with searching the web, Bala wants Tessell’s brand to be inextricable from data optimisation.

He explains: "I feel my mission will be successful when someone asks, ‘did you tessellate your enterprise data?’”

The company name derives from tessellation, the mathematical concept of organising shapes efficiently. Bala draws inspiration from M.C. Escher's artwork, believing tessellation patterns offer a blueprint for enterprise data organisation.

Tessell provides database-as-a-service solutions across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

"Tessellation is a beautiful mix of science and art," Bala continues. "If you can organise it beautifully and allow customers to operate it in the cloud, that solves a very interesting problem."

Recently, AI has added new dimensions to Tessell's mission. Bala sees opportunities to transform complex enterprise data operations into conversational interfaces, similar to ChatGPT's approach to human-computer interaction.

Building pragmatic bridges

Tessell’s mission is more about pragmatism than revolutionary change. Bala knows that most enterprises have invested billions in their digital infrastructure, which makes wholesale changes impractical.

"My way of looking at modernisation is to bring rationality to this whole thing, and then try to form beautiful bridges," he says. 

The company's "lift and shine" philosophy helps customers transition gradually. However, unlike many cloud database services, Tessell operates entirely within customer cloud accounts, ensuring data never leaves their infrastructure. 

"The whole data and data infrastructure lives in the customer accounts," Bala says.

Cost-effective modernisation

Tessell has developed patented technology addressing cloud computing's high-performance storage costs. 

Traditional providers charge premium rates for provisioned input and output operations per second, making mission-critical applications expensive.

"We have a patented technology which can allow customers to run their database infrastructures on a technology called NVMe," Bala reveals. 

This eliminates provisioned IOPS charges while delivering superior performance. Customers typically achieve 35-40% cost reduction alongside performance improvements. 

"You get the most responsive systems with highest throughput, highest performance and the best cost," Bala says, calling it a win-win-win situation.

Tessell’s partnership with Collectors Universe

Tessell's partnership with Collectors Universe, a collectibles authentication platform, exemplifies its collaborative approach. 

Bala and his team helped Collectors Universe to migrate their database systems from AWS services, delivering improved performance at a reduced cost.

"Our first deal was in December, but by April we had a deal three times the size,” Bala explains. “That shows their confidence in us.” 

Looking ahead, Bala wants Tessell to be able to challenge even the biggest data services on the market.

"If people see us as a true challenger to AWS RDS, while having beautiful, highly-differentiated operational database services across all clouds, that's our first goal.”