One of the more exciting ventures I’ve ever been involved in in my career has been participating in the evolution of a business called Rock Solid. Working closely with its founder, Tony Bain, together we have been able to fundamentally disrupt the business of SQL Server Database management. No matter what space you are able to disrupt, it is always exhilarating and exciting – I can highly recommend it!

Rock Solid’s story was covered this week here in The Rust Report.

Tony has been able to innovate a tool to manage and monitor SQL Server databases that can slash the cost of their management – up to 60 per cent of traditional costs – for clients. Now, as that message has begun to get across, the growth of that business is exponential.

This has brought its own challenges for us of course, but ones that we welcome. Managing huge demand and scaling a business to meet that rapid demand are good problems to have! The next challenge for the team is to capitalise on this exciting opportunity now, international expansion, more growth, innovative partnership and so on. But the experience has also proved for me that the incubator model is powerful – as Tony himself explains well:

“[Red Rock] shared the vision and understood what our objective has always been…they have allowed us to heavily invest in our technology, putting us at a considerable advantage in terms of our capability to rapidly grow the business.”

Start Ups need capital of course, but they also need direction, advice, resources and so on. This venture has helped me realise that the incubation sector in Australia should be expanded and this is maybe something Government should help more with?