What keeps chief information officers up at night? Time, money and risk. The triple-headed monster accounts for the biggest source of heartburn for information technology executives when it comes to database migration.

This is why Datometry Inc. has been one of the first companies to acknowledge the concern and offer a solution for database migration to another platform that takes less time, fewer dollars, and potentially lower risk.

“The hard thing about database migrations is it’s actually not migrating the content of the database, but the applications,” said Mike Waas (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of Datometry. “That typically is about 80 or even more percent of your actual cost.”

Waas spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at SiliconANGLE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed Datometry’s application migration approach, the importance of cross-platform cloud solutions, and shifts in how enterprises previously viewed the database structure. (* Disclosure below.)

Founded five years ago, Datometry has built its business model on simplifying a difficult process. The company enables enterprises to remove the difficulty, time and expense of rewriting or reconfiguring applications when a database needs to be moved into a cloud environment.

Hyper-Q drives migration process

The firm’s flagship product that drives the application migration process is Hyper-Q. “It’s almost like a logical hypervisor that sits between the applications and the database,” Waas explained. “Think of it as VMware for databases. We let you get to the cloud quick.”

One of the factors fueling enterprise interest in Datometry is the cross-platform functionality of its migration technology. The company has formed partnerships with major cloud service providers and database vendors, including Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Pivotal Software Inc.

“Most of our customers really come through our partners,” Waas said. “We love all databases, and we are multicloud.”

Datometry is positioned to take advantage of the shift occurring in enterprise information technology where databases were once ivory towers and applications were just satellites orbiting the mother ship. Now databases have become more of a commodity, and applications control the real power in IT.

“All of the complexity and functionality was residing there,” Waas said, describing an earlier view of enterprise database computing. “Now you can actually focus on your applications. That’s where your business is.”

Virtualization for app-centric world

Datometry is also riding another evolution in the IT world, where virtualization tools are increasingly called upon to service an app-centric world. “It’s the core revolution of IT over the last 10 to 15 years, and that’s virtualization,” Waas said. “Everything in the IT stack has been shredded.”

Datometry’s solution is geared toward giving enterprises a solution to move databases into a desired platform, without needing five years of rewriting code and an estimated $20 million to do it. “On the database side, you’ve always been locked into a choice made 10 years ago, and it’s going to be really difficult to get out of it,” Waas said. “People really want liberty. We obviously believe that’s the future.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CubeConversations. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Datometry Inc., the sponsor. Neither Datometry nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE