Rapid reversal: Garantia Data backpedals on its new RedisDB name one day after rebranding

Israeli and California startup Garantia Data secured $9 million in funding earlier this week from Bain Capital Ventures and Carmel Ventures.

The company originally sent us a news release stating that it would change its name to RedisDB. (The new name was intended to reflect the company’s focus on providing an enterprise-grade version of the Redis in-memory key-value store.) But now it has now decided against the rebranding.

The decision to drop the new name came after Salvatore Sanfilippo, the creator of Redis and the top contributor to its open-source community, called Garantia Data’s leaders to complain. Sanfilippo told Garantia that “RedisDB is too close to the name of the community, which is Redis,” Garantia Data cofounder and chief executive Ofer Bengal told VentureBeat in a phone interview.

The forum of the Redis community also goes by the name RedisDB, which Sanfilippo was concerned about, Bengal said.

“Since the name change was not the most important part of this announcement, we did not feel that this is such an issue for us, so we made a quick decision to put it aside for now and continue with our current name and discuss among ourselves a change for some other time in the future and not deal with it right now,” he said.

Garantia Data officially acknowledging the drama in a Tuesday blog post.

Sanfilippo did not threaten to press charges over the name issue, Bengal said. In fact, he said, there are no copyrights on the name RedisDB, and Garantia Data owns the domain name redisdb.com, which on Tuesday was forwarding to garantiadata.com. “It’s a matter of respect, you know?” he said.

Heeding the thoughts of a key open-source contributor makes Bengal and his crew look considerate. At the same time, it also looks like a missed opportunity to position the company as the top hosted Redis provider at a time when the larger NoSQL database market is growing.

But Bengal doesn’t think returning to the original name is such a big deal. “We build our reputation on our customers and on what we offer, and the technological advancements or advantages over all other players in this market,” he said. “We don’t feel that the name is really the important factor here. It would’ve been nice to have the RedisDB name, but there are 10 other nice names that have the word Redis in them that I can think of.”

Then again, he said, the company might end up staying the course with the Garantia Data name.

As we previously reported, Redis is one of the best-known NoSQL offerings, and is being adopted as companies increasingly move away from structured databases. Redis is currently sponsored by Pivotal, the spinout company from executives at virtualization giants VMware and EMC.

Redis is one of the top three databases selected for new applications. Enterprise analyst Ben Kepes cites a number of problems with Redis, which can be unreliable and requires a high level of operational care. That’s where Garantia Data comes in.

With Garantia, large enterprises can take advantage of Redis and are guaranteed cost savings, reliable memory, and auto scaling features.

Garantia also offers support for Memcached, an open source in-memory database offering. For this reason, the company may also have decided to halt its rebrand, especially if the company plans to offer support for open source databases beyond Redis.

Garantia is currently available over public clouds, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Windows Azure, as well as Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers, like Heroku and AppFog.

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