Monday, October 24, 2005

Software

its founder's software desires

By Ethan Forman

TransReplicator Inc. of Weston has fulfilled one of its co-founders' boyhood dreams.

"I wanted to do a product company probably since I was in the seventh grade but it always happened that services was the way to go," said Robert Goulart, 44-year-old president of a 10-person, 18-month-old bootstrapped software startup.

For much of his software career, Goulart has been on the consulting side of the table. First, with Raven Technologies, a small computer consulting firm focused on real-time systems.

From 1994 until 2003, Mark Khayter of Swampscott and he were partners in a company called the Boston Software Collaborative. They sold that business to a Texas firm a couple of years ago.

With Khayter as chief executive, Boston Collaborative grew to 55 people at its peak, Goulart said. The company was "all things relational database," he said.

They mastered complex database software from Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Oracle Corp., San Mateo, Calif.-based Siebel Systems Inc., which Oracle is in the process of buying for $5.85 billion and Dublin, Calif.-based Sybase Inc.

Boston Collaborative's work might include converting databases from one platform to another. But Boston Collaborative did not sell CDs. There was no software for a data center to host. And the services business faced challenges from offshore outsourcing.

Still, the pair had plenty of Oracle, Siebel and Sybase know-how between them. So they brainstormed about the kinds of tasks their services clients had asked them to perform repeatedly.

They realized that clients often asked them to make copies of their large databases for testing. And that meant an awful lot of unencrypted, personal information could walk out the door.

So Khayter and Goulart developed software to make miniature replicas of databases, shrinking them in such a way that they would still be referentially intact. The software could also mask sensitive information like credit card or Social Security numbers. (The company also offers software to reverse the process, taking small databases and scaling them up to see how they would run in a large production environment.)

Usually, companies simply make a copy of their production database to test, Goulart said.

"It's easy. A lot of these databases come with tools inside to make what is called a dump-and-load," he said.

That system works well, but what happens if a database consists of many terabytes?

"The problem is you end up with a production-sized test database, which means you need production-sized hardware to support that," he said. Administrators also need software to manage the copy, and staff to oversee the project. That can get expensive.

Goulart said some companies do try to shrink and mask a database for testing, but that process can take months and is often a manual one. Sending a copy of the production database out the door also brings with it all kinds of security concerns, Goulart said.

While IT administrators guard a company's data from hacker intrusion, they might gladly hand it off to some testing company with operations offshore, he said. And that can raise regulatory compliance concerns, Goulart said.

So far, TransReplicator has landed six clients in health care, biopharmaceuticals and financial services. Its target market consists of large companies that do a lot of quality assurance, testing and database management, he said.

TransReplicator doesn't have a shingle along Route 128.

It's based at Goulart's home in Weston with the staff working from home offices in and around Eastern Massachusetts. A client lent them an office in downtown Boston, but Goulart said employees preferred working from home.

Company officials are performing due diligence, wondering if they need to take venture capital.

And while they have software products to sell, their services habits die hard.

In order to shorten the six-month to a year cycle it takes to make a sale - and to pay the bills - they are offering the software as a service. They land in one part of a company, get the product up and running, and hope it spreads.

"You can license it for additional departments if you like," Goulart said.