Making quick decisions was considered a prerogative of an instinctual person. But now it is a craft that can be mastered by anyone through real-time data processing platforms. Aerospike has helped many companies nurture this skill with its real-time data processing services. Its Database 6 application provides full document database capabilities at a petabyte-scale. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Aveekshith Bushan, Regional Director & General Manager for Asia Pacific, Aerospike.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

The Aerospike Real-time Data Platform enables organizations to act instantly across billions of transactions while reducing server footprint by up to 80 percent. The Aerospike multi-cloud platform powers real-time applications with a predictable sub-millisecond performance from gigabyte-to- petabyte-scale, with low latency and at an affordable cost. The platform is highly reliable with five-nines uptime with globally distributed, strongly consistent data.

Applications built on the Aerospike Real-time Data Platform fight fraud, provide recommendations that dramatically increase shopping cart size, enable global digital payments, and deliver hyper-personalized user experiences to tens of millions of customers. Customers such as Airtel, Criteo, Experian, Nielsen, PayPal, Snap, Wayfair, and Yahoo rely on Aerospike as their data foundation for the future. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, the company also has offices in London, Bangalore, and Tel Aviv.

2. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

When Srini Srinivasan and Brian Bulkowski founded Aerospike 12 years ago, they knew that the proliferation of data we see today was coming. With this in mind, they focused on two critical elements of the Aerospike Real-time Platform, speed, and scale, while keeping the infrastructure footprint to do so at a minimum. Today Aerospike meets the demands of The Right Now Economy™ by processing huge volumes of data in real-time at an unlimited scale. And as more data becomes available, the platform will continue to scale while reducing the cost of operation.

3. Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how do they get value out of it

At Aerospike, we are breaking down silos and encouraging a cultural shift by helping our customers move and augment data from their existing platforms. For instance, we power the Customer facing Airtel Thanks service, while breaking down the silos across the various services that the customer is subscribed to and providing them a highly customized and real-time experience. Organizations across the globe are leveraging our real-time data solutions to manage and scale up their data movement journey. This scaled performance is generating enhanced results and improving the business optimization process.

Developers, Data Architects, and Engineers rely on Aerospike to create mission-critical real-time applications that instantly detect fraud, enhance shopping cart purchases, predict trends, transfer funds around the world, and more. Aerospike currently serves the Online Gaming, Telecommunications, Banking-Financial, eCommerce, and Ad Tech industries. 

4. What does your technology and business roadmap look like for the rest of the year? 

Aerospike is committed to accelerating digital transformation in India. As part of our ongoing journey and vision globally and in India, Aerospike will continue to add more programming languages and document models to allow more developers to work in environments they are familiar with. We are also committed to expanding our presence across more enterprise platforms like AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Red Hat OpenShift, and more.

We will continue to invest in the digital transformation that is occurring in India where the demand for real-time data 'decisioning' is growing at a huge scale. We strongly believe that transformational innovation should not be controlled by data architecture, and on the contrary, should play a decisive role in shaping growth led by digital transformation.

5. How has the adoption of real-time data in India evolved over the last few years?

According to the Assocham-PwC study, India's data consumption is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 72.6 percent to 10,96,58,793 million MB by 2022. The advancement of real-time data in India is driving the digital transformation that many companies are experiencing. From 5G and IoT applications to smart manufacturing, real-time data is changing the way we work and live in our always-on world. With the massive amount of data generated every single day, it is becoming imperative for businesses to invest in the right data management strategies. In this right-now economy, it is the quality of data that determines the success and failures of businesses.

At Aerospike we aim to overcome these challenges with our real-time data platform that can be easily deployed in any public, private, or multi-cloud architecture. With the help of Aerospike's Real-time Data Platform, our customers are looking at making their data even more accessible and valuable through better query capabilities.

6. Which industry verticals are you currently focusing on? And what is your go-to-market strategy for the same?

As mentioned above, we currently focus on Online Gaming, Telecommunications, Banking-Financial, eCommerce, and Ad Tech industries. We are working with customers in these industry verticals to continue to add additional real-time use cases on Aerospike, while they continue to grow their bottom line. In addition, we are beginning to work with Public Sector and Healthcare companies that are becoming increasingly real-time and customer-centric. In all these verticals, Aerospike augments current infrastructure for scale or replaces existing data platforms, where appropriate.

Aerospike's real-time data platform enables organizations to act instantly across billions of transactions. The company's multi-cloud platform powers real-time applications with predictable sub-millisecond performance up to a petabyte-scale—all while reducing server footprint by up to 80%. Last year has probably been the best for Aerospike, we doubled sales worldwide and our Cloud Managed Services grew by 450 percent.

7. Would you like to highlight a few use cases where analytics has benefitted the organization tremendously?

Analytics is increasingly becoming real-time. Gone are the days when slightly stale data could point to what kinds of fraud patterns might exist or to what products or trends might be relevant to the user at this instant of time. Any analytics application has to have access to current and historical data while continuing to enhance its Machine Learning algorithms as more and more data comes in in real-time. Aerospike's architecture is uniquely positioned to harness data coming in at the edge with the massive scale of data already available at the core, to feed into query and analytics engines to provide real-time or near real-time insights on the data. One of the largest payment companies in the world uses Aerospike in the context of real-time fraud detection, to reduce the number of false positives in customer transactions while continuing to meet service SLAs required for successfully completing these transactions. This has helped them reduce fraud exposure by 30x while meeting SLAs 99.95% of the time.