Kim Stanick

Despite the recession, database management firm ParAccel recently said it was continuing to grow, doubling its work force to 60 employees and moving into new facilities in Sorrento Valley.

The venture-backed company, which has operations in Cupertino, said it had doubled its customer base to an undisclosed number since closing on $20 million in funding in December 2007.

That was the second funding round for the startup, which launched in October 2007.

Founded by Barry Zane, an early developer at Netezza, a public company in Massachusetts, ParAccel says it has developed a cost-savings solution for companies managing ever growing mountains of information.

The data warehouse management market, which is the category that ParAccel is in that includes the hardware and server platforms, was $5 billion for 2007, $5.5 billion in 2008 and expected to climb to $8 billion by 2012, according to IBC. The data warehouse management category is a subcategory of the business analytics software market, which is much larger.

For instance, Merkle, a huge Baltimore database marketing agency, recently hired ParAccel to help organize and manage more than 75 marketing databases.

Merkle, which blasts several billion direct mailings and e-mails a year, needed a solution to allow it to continue to grow its databases while doubling the speed of its data mining.

Records like those maintained by Merkle contain redundant information, such as names and addresses. As consumer records grow into the hundreds of millions, eliminating the redundancy amounts to wasted time and higher costs.

ParAccel, with its patented “high speed columnar” system, allows Merkle to search and sort isolated pieces of each record. It also performs “parallel searches,” meaning it uses multiple computers to perform searches. All of this saves money, says company spokeswoman Kim Stanick.

“If I’m a marketer and wanted to see which customers in La Jolla had bought red cars, typically I would have to look at every customer,” said Stanick. “With columnar, you only have to look at the red cars.”

Thinking Machines

As companies manage larger volumes of data, they need scalable solutions. Analytics, known as the science of analysis, is an attempt to allow machines to “think” smarter, says Bob Slapin, executive director of the San Diego Software Industry Council, which tracks the growing analytics industry in San Diego — home to as many as 80 companies working in the field of analytics.

“It is huge and growing bigger with every mouse click,” he said. “If you think about it, every transaction, everything you do is digital. That’s a data point. Someone, somewhere in the world wants to make sense of that data point. We’re accumulating these data points faster than we can digest them. That’s why we have an increasing importance for analytics.”