How To Build and Manage your Online Database

Building and managing a database is in a painful journey, especially when you’re low in budget. Founded in early 2008, Taiwan-based start-up, Ragic is a tool for companies to create and manage enterprise database applications.

The founder, Jeff Kuo, has been working on Ragic for quite some time after graduated from college in 2003 and had worked in an IT department to gain more experience on how company IT departments deal with IT problems. Plus, Jeff’s master thesis is also on the same topic.

“Early during graduate school I studied on AI, and was doing part-time job coding with some software companies for TSMC. I realized that there is a deep problem with the way people develop enterprise IT systems, the projects for custom enterprise systems are just too long, costly and fails too often. It’s far from the idea way that enterprises could respond to their IT needs. I felt that I can apply some of the ideas that I’ve researched on AI to create a better way to do all this,” explained Jeff when asked on what inspired him to create Ragic.

Jeff told us that Ragic has a very special data structure design derived from his AI research. This special design enables users to create randomly complex data structure, and customize them to the users’ needs at anytime.

Taking advantage of this, Ragic built a web-based spreadsheet interface to design Ragic applications, and use Ragic applications. “This is very hard to do with traditional database design, especially when you want your application design to be flexible while the schema may be very complex,” said Jeff.

Ragic’s spreadsheet interface came with a strong reason as spreadsheet is one of the most intuitive interface for business users. Catch the walkthrough video to understand Ragic better:

Right now Ragic has 4 full-time team members: Chris, Charles and Jeff are RD engineers working on products and projects. Allie works on marketing, documents, art design and other administrative work. The team might consider moving to other countries as Jeff told us that Taiwan isn’t an ideal market for enterprise business. Some of Ragic’s competitors include Force.com and Quickbase. But Ragic differentiates from the competitors by providing a service that is much easier and faster to learn and use.

“We’re in the area of providing a high level PaaS tool to create enterprise applications with as little coding as possible. Our spreadsheet interface and flexible data design makes our solution much easier to learn, and developers can build applications much faster using our product comparing to our competitors. The result applications are also much easier to use,” said Jeff.

Ragic currently has over 3,000 registered users. Some applications does not require a Ragic account as users could login through Facebook Connect. “We started paying accounts around November last year. Right now we have around 20 paying customers,” said Jeff

Ragic isn’t backed by any investors so far and is supporting themselves through Ragic product sales and service income. On a last note, Ragic is the answer to help you build and manage your online database. You can try it here and feel free to provide feedback in our comment section below.