Charlotte Yarkoni [Photo by Dan Schlatter]

Xeround moved its headquarters from Israel to Bellevue 15 months ago after Charlotte Yarkoni joined the software company. Now, the former Amdocs and Cingular executive is transitioning the company from an R&D shop to one focused on sales and business development. 

Xeround's software helps mobile phone companies -- including T-Mobile and Pelephone -- unify subscriber information across various databases. We caught up with 39-year-old native of Greenville, South Carolina to chat about everything from cloud computing to being a woman in tech to the fortunate timing of the company's last venture round.

What is Xeround?

"We are an infrastructure, meaning a back-end piece of software that people purchase and implement in their shops to enable services or applications.... We do database virtualization, and primarily our focus today is in the communication service provider market with the telephone operators."

And what does the software do?

"We are a layer that sits on top of those data stores, that basically takes away all of that complexity and says: 'here is all of your subscriber data, you don't really care where it sits, you don't really care how it is stored -- but this is how we provide it for either existing services to get re-tooled or new services to be built off of it.' It tremendously lowers the cost of providing new solutions and supporting existing solutions."

How long does it take to implement Xeround?

"Our average lead time is about 60 days to start using our product and start gaining the value.... We are all about short-term realization of your investment at a much lower cost than any other solution that exists. Any company that comes with that type of proposition is going to do well in this market."

How were companies accessing this data before?

"There are pretty traditional mechanisms. If you wanted to get access to existing data that may have sat in two different databases, you would write some complex code to go pull that data out and map it into a consistent format and provide a view to it....We try to leverage the existing infrastructure that is already in the shop today, so you don't need to reinvent the wheel."

Does Amazon Web Services have an equivalent offering to Xeround?

"We are one layer of the architecture around distributed data management. Amazon has a full breadth of offerings.... If you want to map that trend to what Xeround does, we are not a cloud. We are one layer of a cloud. We aren't the hardware side and we aren't the application or software service side of it, we are actually the data management layer of it. Amazon offers a full cloud, a full set of services from the hardware up through the application. Their approach to data management is that they do have a set of tools that they offer, and they are not really geared toward enterprises."

Are they competition?

"I don't really compete with Amazon today, because Amazon has a much broader focus. They are a full stack. And they are very powerful on the consumer side, as is Google. And there are some enterprise applications primarily supporting the desktop that they do very well. This is not my sweet spot."

Aren't Google and Amazon moving deeper into the enterprise with their offerings?

"I think it is a plan of everybody's focused on cloud computing.... Most customers today ... have some very discreet thoughts about what a cloud means to them and they are very anxious to make their data centers more efficient and treat them more as utilities and move more commodity services into a cloud. In the case of telephone operators, their one key asset is their subscribers, and they are not making a big push to move that large volume of very proprietary data into a cloud for security reasons and a variety of other reasons."

So it won't happen in the enterprise?

"Do I think that cloud as we think about it as an end-to-end strategy is going to get institutionalized near-term and that is how we are all going to operate? No. That's a larger stretch."

Why not?

"You have to remember that everybody operates at the speed of their infrastructure today and businesses aren't going to rip out everything they have to go to a cloud just to go to a cloud because then they don't capture the cost saving and efficiencies that they were looking for.... But, I think in general, it is a pretty interesting trend that is going to have a lot of implications in the market and in the technologies that get introduced in the next five to 10 years."

So what does that trend mean for Xeround?

"Where we spend the most of our time thinking is around data, because that is kind of our bailiwick. Data is very interesting because the traditional databases that sit out there aren't lent toward cloud computing. They were meant to be very large repositories that sat in a back plane in a data center somewhere with a set of overhead required to manage them in a discreet environment. What is interesting is that the concept of a database will change significantly over the next five to 10 years ... mapping itself to what we call today cloud."

What's it like having R&D operations in Israel and the headquarters in Bellevue?

"There are nuances when doing business with any offshore company, culturally and time zone wise and all of these other factors. But in today's economy, you are very hard-pressed to have a regional focus on your operations when you are trying to work in a global environment."

What impact is the economy having on your business?

"We are a small company and we were very fortunate to have some very good seed successes in 2008 to kick us off. Even in spite of the economy waning last year, we also completed our B series of funding in the middle of the year, which was very fortunate for us. A lot of the struggles that smaller companies are having today is not because they are not good companies, it is just that they are in very different time in their life cycle which makes it challenging from a cash position. I've been very fortunate to not have these issues."

What's it like being a female CEO in the tech business?

"I've never noticed that. I've always been in technical education, technical classes, so maybe I am a little bit desensitized to that."

A closer look at Charlotte Yarkoni

Age: 39

Hometown: Greenville, South Carolina.

Hobbies: Family, snowboarding and riding horses.

First job: Hostess for Steak & Ale.

Education: Bachelor of Science degree in Management Science and Industrial Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

If you weren't running Xeround, what job would you be doing: Helping animals. "I am involved in a large animal rescue program here locally and I most recently served on the board of directors for the humane society."

Car you drive: Mercedes G500

Favorite tech gadget: Blackberry. "Coming from the cellular industry -- I used to be an executive with Bell South and Cingular -- I get a very short attention span to devices. One thing that has been a tried-and-true steady of friend of mine is the Blackberry.

Vacation destination: Costa Rica