Santa Clara, CA, December 4, 2009-- Kickfire™, Inc., the price/performance leader in analytic appliances, today announced that Handmark®, a world-leading creator and distributor of mobile applications and services, has been voted the winner of Kickfire’s data warehousing challenge. To view the winning You Tube video submission from Handmark, please visit http://www.kickfire.com/Contest/Video_Contest.

Handmark, headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, powers more than 50 mobile content storefronts globally with the industry’s best applications covering news and information, games, lifestyle and travel, reference and productivity, personalization and more. Currently, the company exports data from MySQL® servers into a Microsoft SQL Server database where Visual Studio is used to build custom reports. “Since applications are billed directly from carriers, we must build reports that detail how many people are buying our apps as well as to determine user statistics, such as user volume and retention,” said Ramesh Narayanan, Handmark Database Analyst. “We employ very large tables such as our call and ad-metrics tables so database performance is not always p to our standards. We look forward to using Kickfire as part of our ongoing efforts to ead the mobile application industry in service and performance,” Narayanan said.

Kickfire will Dramatically Improve Query Performance

Handmark plans to implement its new Kickfire analytics appliance to exponentially speed up query performance. “As demand for our mobile content continues to rapidly rise, our data volumes are rising exponentially as well,” Narayanan said. “We anticipate that Kickfire’s analytic appliance will significantly speed up our query response times, enabling us to keep pace with our data and demands. We want to bring cutting edge technology and analytics to all our users, including making analytics available to end-users,” he said. “We believe that Kickfire will help us deliver on that promise.”

“The voters have spoken and we are delighted to award Handmark with a Kickfire analytic appliance to manage their data warehouse, business intelligence and reporting needs,” said Kickfire CEO Bruce Armstrong. “We look forward to supporting Handmark’s desire to quickly transform their business by addressing their need for faster analytics and reporting capabilities,” Armstrong said. “Kickfire is rapidly garnering interest from high-growth start-ups as well as enterprise customers such as Handmark that require a low cost, high performance analytic appliance.”

About Handmark

Handmark is the world-leading creator and distributor of mobile applications and services. The company delivers an engaging, customized experience for your mobile phone with the industry's best applications covering news and information, games, lifestyle and travel, reference and productivity, personalization and more. As one of the leading distributors of mobile content and storefronts for 10 years, Handmark has established itself as the premier mobile content partner. For more information, visit www.handmark.com.

About Kickfire

Kickfire’s analytic appliance is the price/performance leader in data warehousing. Based on a patented SQL Chip that packs the power of tens of CPUs into an exceptionally small, low-power form factor, Kickfire delivers a quantum leap in performance efficiency -- avoiding the hardware build out, power, and space costs of today's data warehouse and database offerings. By delivering astoundingly fast query performance out of the box, Kickfire’s plug-and-play appliance enables organizations to enjoy faster time-to-insight for demanding business intelligence, reporting, and analysis. Kickfire appliances scale from gigabytes to terabytes and are based on Linux and commodity hardware. They leverage the openness of MySQL and its entire ecosystem to ensure compatibility and rapid deployment. Kickfire is backed by blue-chip venture capital firms: Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, The Mayfield Fund and Pinnacle Ventures. For more information, please visit www.kickfire.com.

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