Landboss experienced business and technology setbacks because of the MySQL component of the land management software that it provided as an Internet service to brokers of oil and gas leases. When customers demanded a geospatial-mapping capability that MySQL didn’t support, Landboss stood to lose market share. To prevent that, the company migrated from MySQL. Landboss rejected other open-source database solutions, as well as Oracle, in favor of Microsoft SQL Server 2008. The Microsoft choice made it possible for Landboss to bring the new software to market at least 20 percent faster; cut development and ongoing maintenance costs by 15 percent; increase availability to 99.999 percent; and boost customers’ confidence in the security of the data, compared to alternatives. The company expects the SQL Server–based version of its software to help boost the company’s revenues by 150 percent.

Situation
If he had it all to do over again today, Cole Shelton says he’d do it differently. Instead of first basing his company’s service on the MySQL open-source database, he’d choose Microsoft—specifically, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 data management software.

But back in 2008, MySQL looked like the right decision. Shelton, Managing Partner of Landboss, was leading the team that was developing the company’s initial software-as-a-service offering: a system for brokers, who act on behalf of buyers and sellers of oil and gas leases, to record their time and billings for submission to their clients. That service led quickly to the company’s second offering: a module to keep track of the acquisitions and sales of oil and gas leases that brokers handle on behalf of their clients.

As a start-up company, Landboss needed to keep costs to an absolute minimum. Open-source software that was available without a licensing fee—MySQL—appeared to meet that need. But appearances can be deceiving. Landboss ran into problems in implementing MySQL and found a dearth of online resources to address the problems. That cost the company time and money as it searched for ways around the problems.

Keeping our costs low is as important today as it was the day we were founded…. SQL Server is not only the most effective choice, but the most cost-effective choice as well. Cole Shelton Managing Partner, Landboss

And when Landboss went to market with its lease-tracking service, it discovered another unexpected cost of the open-source choice: an obstacle to sales. “The brokers in the oil and gas lease business tend to be conservative in their business choices, and they’re not computer savvy—they haven’t needed to be,” says Shelton. “So when they had natural concerns about the security of their business information on our servers, we couldn’t allay those concerns by talking about MySQL. They didn’t know what it was.”

The company’s problems with MySQL only grew. When the recession hit, Oklahoma-based Landboss refocused its marketing efforts on the Texas natural gas market, which was still vibrant. And then it discovered another limitation of MySQL. The company’s original market hadn’t expected the Landboss service to provide mapping capability because Oklahoma land is largely laid out along a simple grid, so leases can be tracked in Microsoft Excel worksheets. That wasn’t the case in Texas, however. There, the irregularly shaped plots meant that sophisticated mapping functionality was needed in order to record the contours of leased land. The MySQL-based software lacked geospatial data capability, rendering it unable to meet the need. That put the Landboss service at a disadvantage in trying to capture much of the largest market available to it during tough times.

It was a disadvantage that the company’s competitors were ready and willing to exploit. Running their software on alternative components, such as Oracle Spatial software, competitors were able to offer Texas customers the sophisticated mapping capability that customers needed. Landboss was feeling the pain. “We were losing sales to companies with inferior products because they had this one, crucial capability that we lacked,” says Shelton. “We had to solve this problem if we were to become competitive.”

Solution
Landboss first considered its options. It could obtain geospatial capability from another open-source application, Postgres, but that wouldn’t address the other limitations that Landboss had discovered in MySQL.

Oracle, the choice of some of the company’s competitors, was an option—but not for Landboss, Shelton decided. “I was familiar with Oracle; I’d worked in a data-warehousing company, where I administered Oracle and wrote a lot of queries against it,” says Shelton. “The licensing is complex and expensive. Administration of the software is complex and expensive. You need more DBAs [database administrators] than you do for other database software, and each DBA is more expensive. It takes more intellectual capital and analytic power to deal with Oracle. I’d worked with Oracle before. I didn’t want to work with it again.”

When [customers] had natural concerns about the security of their business information on our servers, we couldn’t allay those concerns by talking about MySQL. They didn’t know what it was. Cole Shelton Managing Partner, Landboss

Ruling out database options was proving to be easy. Finding the right choice, given the high stakes riding on the decision, was more difficult. Landboss sought assistance from InterWorks, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with which it had worked in the past. “We’d made a database decision before,” says Shelton. “We wanted to make sure that when we made this decision again, it would be for the last time. We also wanted to ensure that the transition from MySQL to our new database would be seamless. InterWorks had the expertise to advise us wisely on the decision, to help us understand the complexities of the geospatial issues, and then to see that we addressed the issues properly. We were concerned, for example, that shifting a larger share of our business to geospatial data, which is highly compute intensive, would mean a sudden, dramatic increase in our need for scalability; we wanted to be prepared.”

InterWorks reviewed the company’s options and validated the conclusion to which Landboss itself was coming: SQL Server 2008. The Microsoft choice offered a range of options—from the entry-level SQL Server Express to SQL Server Datacenter—to serve Landboss regardless of how fast and how far the company’s business would grow. SQL Server Standard, with which Landboss went live, included a wealth of built-in data management tools, which would keep to a minimum the time and expense associated with managing a SQL Server–based database. SQL Server DBAs are both more available and less costly than their counterparts for Oracle. And with the newest edition, SQL Server now offered enterprise-class geospatial data capabilities that would fully meet the company’s needs.

InterWorks and Landboss began to implement the move to SQL Server 2008 Standard just before the start of 2009. Using the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition development system, they quickly assembled a prototype that proved out the concept. For example, the prototype demonstrated that SQL Server could handle the increased load on the database coming from adding geospatial queries in addition to the nonspatial queries that the earlier database had handled. The full transition to SQL Server was completed within six weeks. The new implementation runs on the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system.

Once the database was transitioned to the geospatial-capable SQL Server 2008, InterWorks assisted with integrating Autodesk MapGuide, a third-party application, into the Landboss service. MapGuide provides the mapping functionality that is now captured by the new database.

The Landboss service runs on a trio of software servers, one each for the database, the mapping application, and the web front end. These three software servers coexist on one physical computer, a Dell R710 with two quad-core Xeon processors. The choice to use one high-powered computer was a way to minimize the management burden on the small service provider. But Landboss isn’t limited to that choice.

“One of the things we like about SQL Server is that we can continue to scale up by moving to larger computers, or scale out by adding low-cost computers to our existing infrastructure,” says Shelton. “SQL Server gives us that flexibility.”

Benefits
By adopting SQL Server, Landboss was able to get its new service to market quickly and has seen the costs of supporting the service decline. In addition, the increased reliability and security of the service are leading to greater customer interest. As a result, the company expects to boost revenues this year by 150 percent.

Reduced Time-to-Market by at Least 20 Percent
Landboss was focused on migrating to a database that would help it to avoid the hassles, time commitment, and cost associated with resolving development and implementation issues in MySQL. By moving to SQL Server, Landboss has put these issues behind it, according to Shelton.

“The tools built into SQL Server are better and easier to use than those available for MySQL and other open-source options,” he says. “So, many of the management problems we had with open source never became problems with SQL Server.”

I’d worked with Oracle before. I didn’t want to work with it again. Cole Shelton Managing Partner, Landboss

In particular, Shelton praises the capabilities of SQL Server Management Studio. “My Microsoft development experience was limited to Visual Studio,” he says, “so I’m very pleased to see that Microsoft has created a comprehensive, fully functional IDE [integrated development environment] in SQL Server. AutoComplete is in SQL Server, the query analyzer is in SQL Server. The debugger is great, and the profiler allows you to track issues during development.”

Development of the new version of the service was also expedited by the availability of abundant resources—both on the web and through consultants—for SQL Server. “When an issue arose, we had a hundred-times better chance of finding the answer on a Microsoft knowledge base, forum, discussion board, or third-party resource than we’d had with MySQL,” says Shelton. “That alone accelerated our development by about 20 percent—not because we wrote code faster, but simply because we didn’t waste as much time as we had with MySQL.”

And, of course, the spatial capability available through SQL Server Management Studio made a significant contribution to the transition project. “The spatial query support built into Management Studio is excellent,” Shelton says. “Using SQL Server 2008, we were able to quickly import tens of thousands of shape files and begin writing spatial queries against them.”

Reduces Costs by 15 Percent
The availability of the tools included in SQL Server eliminated the need for Landboss to buy third-party tools, which it would have needed had it chosen one of the open-source options. Further, the easier manageability of SQL Server, compared to Oracle, reduced the cost of each DBA hired to support the system and reduced the total number of DBAs needed for the project. Consultancy support was also available at rates that were more competitive than those Landboss would have seen with either open-source options or Oracle. And the licensing that Landboss paid for SQL Server was a fraction of what the company would have paid had it chosen Oracle.

Combined, these factors mean reduced costs for Landboss as a result of choosing SQL Server over either MySQL or Oracle, costs that may be as much as 15 percent lower—a fact that’s not lost on Shelton.

“Keeping our costs low is as important today as it was the day we were founded,” says Shelton. “Back then, we thought ‘low cost’ was primarily a function of licensing. Now we know better. When you consider all of the expenses—for third-party tools, consultants, DBAs, time-to-market, and the time required to implement new capabilities—that flow from the database decision, SQL Server is not only the most effective choice, but the most cost-effective choice as well.”

Delivers 99.999 Percent Uptime and Boosts Marketability
Building a successful software service means more than just reducing costs. It also means providing the features and capabilities for which customers are looking. The Landboss service with SQL Server delivers that as well.

Delivering reliability, for example, requires Landboss to run without unscheduled downtime. SQL Server delivers that type of reliability. “We have at least the five nines of reliability—99.999 percent—from SQL Server,” says Shelton. “That’s crucial to our business because when customers pay for a service, they expect it to be available to them 24 hours a day, seven days a week—no excuses. And because our customers work long and crazy hours, around–the-clock availability isn’t a ‘nice to have,’ it’s a ‘must-have.’ With SQL Server, we have it.”

In contrast to the uncertainty that Landboss’s customers expressed about MySQL, the choice of SQL Server allays that uncertainty. “Before, we didn’t make a point to customers that we were running on MySQL because it raised concerns about security and didn’t help us to make a sale. Now, when we make a presentation to a new business prospect, we highlight the fact that we’re running on Microsoft SQL Server,” says Shelton. “It’s a real selling point. Even if our prospects aren’t technical, they know the Microsoft name and regard the company’s products as reliable. We don’t have to say anything more about security—they know that their data will be protected, yet available to them and only them whenever they need it.”

Supports Projected Annual Revenue Growth of 150 Percent
All of these factors—a shorter time-to-market, and a geospatial-mapping capability that is cost-effective, very secure, scalable, and dependable—mean that Landboss now has a viable service to offer in the highly competitive Texas market. From being a company whose future was at risk, Landboss now is on track to boost its annual revenues by 150 percent.

“Many factors contribute to our growth,” says Shelton. “But SQL Server is front and center among them. Without this technology on which to base our business, we’d be looking at diminished returns instead of the opportunity to capture an ever-larger share of the hottest market for our service in the country.”

Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
For more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:
www.microsoft.com/servers/default.mspx

For More Information
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For more information about InterWorks, call (405) 624-3214 or visit the website at:
www.interworksinc.com

For more information about Landboss, call (866) 490-9643 or visit the website at:
www.landboss.com