OpenBase Success Stories

Marketcircle offers innovative, intuitive contact management for small businesses

DayLite continues to grow on an OpenBase SQL foundation.

"We have to be able to deal effectively with datasets that range from very small to very large -- and we find that OpenBase has the flexibility to do that, and does it well."

Providing efficient, effective customer contact and sales management data management -- that's the mission of Marketcircle. The Toronto-based software developer is the company behind DayLite, a popular contact and sales management tool for Mac OS X.

"Our target market is small -- but growing -- businesses," explains Marketcircle president Alykhan Jetha. DayLite is designed to suit the contact and sales management needs of companies with up to 25 users -- offering a smooth and efficient tool that allows management to maintain a constant overview on overall company sales, while at the same time offering the option of a detailed focus on any specific task in the sales process.

Sophisticated and Powerful

The key to the product's success is its innovative object-centered approach -- translating people, companies, or other real-world entities into DayLite Objects, which can be maneuvered, referenced, indexed, and collated in any number of ways, all at the same time. The result is a sophisticated workplace tool allowing small-scale users the flexibility and power of complex, full-scale contact management applications, without the need for dedicated database servers or an army of system administrators to oversee daily operation. Needless to say, a product able to display such sophisticated data management techniques demands a back-end database capable of fast, versatile responses.

OpenBase SQL provides that foundation. "I began using OpenBase even before it was OpenBase," comments Jetha. Becoming acquainted with the product long before before founding Marketcircle in 1999, Jetha found a useful role for OpenBase with his new enterprise. "We originally used it as part of our development work," he continues, "because it was easy to manage and fast compared to using Oracle or Sybase -- the big guns in database applications at the time. We needed an easy, intuitive, lightweight tool in which we could develop our applications, and then would migrate them to other databases"

OpenBase Grows With The Company

From that simple beginning, OpenBase grew with Marketcircle, and today OpenBase SQL 8.0 is an essential component in DayLite's success. "We now use OpenBase as a powerful backend for our clients and customers, as well as our development work," Jetha explains. "It's very important that our applications have a backend that's robust and fault-tolerant and doesn't corrupt data. After all, customer data is the lifeblood of our business, and we can't afford to lose information. And with OpenBase SQL, that just doesn't happen."

DayLite users bring a wide range of data management challenges to bear, in a variety of business environments. Some users might utilize the application to maintain a small collection of personal business contacts, while for other users, the application might store ever-changing customer leads and transaction records for a bustling sales department. But whatever the challenge, OpenBase is solid and reliable. "We have to be able to deal effectively with datasets that range from very small to very large -- and we find that OpenBase has the flexibility to do that, and does it well," Jetha notes. "We've implemented an OpenBase system which lazy-loads data -- it brings up information only as the user requests it, and by doing that, and by taking advantage of OpenBase's indexing, we're able to get really fast responses."

Smooth, Efficient Development

Development work in OpenBase SQL proceeds smoothly most of the time, but on those rare occasions when difficulties do arise, the Marketcircle team takes full advantage of OpenBase's responsive support staff. "It's a real plus," affirms Jetha. "When we run into a problem, OpenBase is quick to respond and provide either a fix or an interim solution. But I want to emphasize -- it's rarely necessary."

The efficiencies enjoyed by Marketcircle's development team through their work in OpenBase SQL are passed along to customers, and Jetha is an enthusiastic booster of the product. "The biggest advantages are pricing, user support, ease of management, and robustness," Jetha declares. "We've used OpenBase from the very beginning of DayLite, so it's difficult to compare it specifically against other database platforms -- but we do know it would be much more difficult for us to use any other product. It's also a real advantage for our customers -- the flexibility of OpenBase SQL really comes into play when you consider how much more tedious it would be to prepare similar system architectures in any other database environment."