Hit Labs Connects Teams Pronto with MariaDB Xpand in SkySQL Cloud Database

Communications platform dynamically scales to meet demands year round with distributed SQL in the cloud

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. and HELSINKI – October 26, 2022 – MariaDB® Corporation today announced that Hit Labs, the creators behind the all-in-one communication platform Pronto, is powering its business with Xpand, MariaDB’s distributed SQL database, deployed on a fully managed cloud database service MariaDB SkySQL running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Facing a fast-growing user base, Pronto turned to Xpand in SkySQL for its elasticity and high availability – making it easy to scale out and onboard millions of users. To give their team the ability to focus fully on delivering the best communications experience to their customers, Pronto also brought in SkyDBAs for proactive and expert care of its cloud databases.

Tweet This: Stay connected pronto! Learn why @ProntoBusiness moved to @MariaDB #SkySQL #cloud #database to improve real-time student engagement and enhance employee connectivity. https://bit.ly/3UZsFGh 

A Cloud Database That Expands to Meet Seasonal Peaks

Pronto provides a mobile-optimized communication platform for higher education institutions through chat, video conferencing, announcement tools, automatic language translation, file sharing and task management. Given a large part of its business supports higher education institutions, much of Pronto’s seasonal peaks are aligned with the academic school year. Pronto turned to Xpand in SkySQL for its elasticity and high availability with zero downtime to support their changing needs throughout the year. With SkySQL, Pronto only pays for the resources used, giving them the ability to save costs if they scale back during summer break. 

“Moving to the cloud with MariaDB Xpand in SkySQL was an easy decision for us,” said TJ Hunter, software engineer and co-founder at Pronto. “Since the pandemic started, higher education institutions and professors rely heavily on our product Pronto as their remote learning solution. Powered by SkySQL, Pronto onboards thousands of students within minutes, allowing educators to communicate directly with their students, in addition to students communicating with other students. Xpand in SkySQL lets us scale horizontally to meet these new demands with the push of a button so we can focus on growing our business.”

Personalized Office Hours with SkyDBAs 

By being a small and lean organization, many of Pronto’s resources are focused on enhancing product offerings for its customers. With SkyDBAs, Pronto gets expert database support at a fraction of the cost, allowing them to offload many of its database responsibilities and operations such as daily maintenance, backup and disaster recovery. “Our SkyDBAs are great and we consider them an extension of our team,” said Hunter. “They provide proactive 24×7 expert care to ensure we’re getting the best performance and quickly resolving any issues. They’ve been instrumental in taking things off my plate and exploring options to optimize our operations.” 

Available on AWS and Google Cloud, SkySQL is MariaDB’s fully managed cloud database service. SkySQL takes care of everything from provisioning the cloud infrastructure to installing and deploying the database, configuring the database for production environments, and automating failover. It is capable of scaling out a single database to hundreds of nodes with ease using distributed SQL and can deploy modern data warehouses for interactive, ad hoc analytics on massive data sets to meet enterprise demands – all at a fraction of the cost of legacy databases. 

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About MariaDB

MariaDB frees companies from the costs, cloud lock-in, constraints and complexity of proprietary databases, enabling them to reinvest in what matters most – rapidly developing innovative, customer-facing applications. MariaDB uses pluggable, purpose-built storage engines to support workloads that previously required a variety of specialized databases. With complexity and constraints eliminated, enterprises can now depend on a single complete database for their needs, whether on commodity hardware or their cloud of choice. Deployed in minutes for transactional, analytical or hybrid use cases, MariaDB delivers operational agility without sacrificing key enterprise features, including real ACID compliance and full SQL. Trusted by organizations such as Bandwidth, DigiCert, InfoArmor, Oppenheimer, Samsung, SelectQuote, SpendHQ – MariaDB meets the same core requirements as proprietary databases at a fraction of the cost. No wonder it’s one of the fastest-growing database management systems companies. Real business relies on MariaDB™.