Xeround Plans Cloud Database Service Shutdown

CEO Razi Sharir, reached this morning, declined to provide details about the decision to discontinue Xeround's public cloud service, other than to point to a blog posted by company management saying that "Xeround's leadership forum has recently decided to re-focus the company's effort."

"There is nothing else to disclose at this time," Sharir said, when asked about the reasons behind the service shutdown and the company's plans going forward.

[Related: Amazon's AWS Chief: Cloud Services Party Just Getting Started ]

Xeround offered a paid cloud database service for MySQL applications and a free 10-MB version of the service for users of the Rackspace Cloud, Joyent Cloud and HP Cloud Services, as described in a CRN.com slideshow on technology startups last July.

In the blog posted Wednesday, Xeround said all free database instances will be discontinued May 8 and paid plans terminated on May 15.

"Xeround's leadership forum has recently decided to re-focus the company’s effort," the blog said. "This means we will no longer be able to support our service over public clouds, across all of our currently active data centers.

"We ask you to please export your database instance and migrate your database to another service of your choosing before the termination date. We sincerely appreciate the support that our thousands of customers have shown us over the last couple of years. We regret the inconvenience this causes you, and hope your migration to a new DB solution goes smoothly," the blog said.

The company also disclosed its plans in a series of tweets, including: "With a grave heart we announce the termination of our public service. big thanks 2 all our users for the overwhelming support :-(."

Company tweets also said that customers with paid subscriptions would be billed for the service only through April.

"Understandable that companies sometimes need to 're-focus efforts' and discontinue service, but seems like pretty short notice, no?" said one respondent to the Xeround Tweets.

Xeround is based in Mountain View, Calif., with research and development operations in Yehud, Israel.

PUBLISHED ON MAY 3, 2013