‘If You Have to be a Successful Enterprise, You Have to Play in the Space’

Adoption of real-time technoloy in enterprises

Srini Srinivasan, CTO & Founder, Aerospike

Back in 2007, when the iPhone was introduced in the US, it changed the behaviour of people. The adoption essentially skyrocketed. Any enterprise that wanted to survive in this environment had to be savvy enough and create a user experience for consumers which is in line with what they are used to seeing in mobile devices from the usual suspects. And this dynamic we predicted would crossover to the standard enterprises and that’s precisely what we have seen over the years. There is a nonlinearity of the Internet, which is at play.

The same user experience that you provided to the first user, you have to provide to the mil-lionth user, the 100 millionth user, the billionth user, and so on. And that creates challenges. And if you are to be a successful enterprise, you have to play in the space at a level where you are on par or better than competitors and that’s the trend we are seeing continuing to move across enterprise verticals.. So we are seeing more and more enterprises adopting real time technology. Traditional banks, for example, have also had to work with the API and our Dream 11 essentially uses this technology in their fantasy cricket applications.

Any difference in solutions for corporates and startups

We focus on a series of support for real time decision making. The startups, which are starting now, they started on things from scratch because they don’t have this existing business that they’re running. A lot of startups started using aerospace when they were small and they kept growing 10 or hundred level fold. This level of exponential growth is costly because of the user experience trends. Enterprises also have to com-pete in this space. Let’s take a large bank, for example. First of all, they have to operate with startups like Dream 11 in terms of the transactions, but more importantly, they have to provide a level of engage-ment to their customers. There is a generation which has never gone into a bank.. They’re mobile savvy. But the point is it’s a completely different behavior. So the enterprises essentially have to use this technology.

Customers who have made big wih your platform

There is Dream 11. Then there is InMobi, which is another one which is an ad tech com-pany. Payment companies in India like paytm, phone pay, for example, are heavy users of Aerospike in various aspects of their ecosystem. Not everybody is using it everywhere. Some of them use it a lot, some of them use a little bit less. Some are in the middle. PayPal, for example, is using Aerospike for fraud detection. You know, a very large brokerage firm in the US has used Aerospike for risk analysis. They basically analyze risk on their customer’s portfolio every couple of minutes.So if I look at telcos, Airtel for example, we are a key part of that platform.

Platform helping clients rolling out 5G

5G is a new thing that’s happening, and it’s gonna 75essentially be the norm maybe like two or three years down the road. A lot of new applications in 5G require a lot of real time data process-ing. So we expect to see a number of use cases. This one kind to some extent aligns with that startup question you asked, because 5G is not a startup, but it’s starting up as a new area where you are going to expand the kinds of applications and the usage of the network by consumers in a huge way. So we have like dozens of use cases, I’m sure with all the telcos that we are already working with them. On many of these, they’re actually using Aerospike there. So we are a key component of those technologies and of those use cases in 5G that are gonna be deployed in the next year or so.

Competing with other players in the market

Aerospike can basically store 10 times more real time data per normal node of a cluster than comparable products. We also compete based on the amount of high availability that we can provide for ap-plications. There are many of our customers who have run Aerospike for almost a decade or more, who have never had outages.And they’re not run-ning simple systems. They’re running systems at scale, have millions of users, and they need very low latencies to provide a great user ex-perience because people are impatient with their phones. So that is essentially how we compete. We provide much better SLAs for applications. So the user experience is much bet-ter. It consists of high avail-ability, low latency and strong consistency. We actually have money transfer applications where we don’t lose any data.

Benefits of NOSQL databases over other ones

When I say NoSQL, I don’t mean that we don’t support SQL. In fact, we don’t have a query language apart from SQL in Aerospike. However, when I say NoSQL, there are other models of data, one of them is key value. This is where we started. The other one is document oriented. So think of it as transactional data, which has a certain data model, which means if you have an application, many naturally occurring applications are mapped into documents.

So when you look at NoSQL, what we’re saying is it’s more than relational. Now, SQL typically has been used for relational, doesn’t mean SQL cannot be used for non-relational systems. That’s why we are also allowed SQL to query our documents. We don’t necessarily build the query processing engine. We use other systems too. So ba-sically a system like Aerospike can support key values. It also supports document access. All of that is a different way of accessing data than relational. And so that’s kind of what NoSQL is, more than the basic classical databases do. We have this platform, which is really good in terms of pro-cessing lots of data really fast.

Plans and growth strategies for the Indian market

We have been in India from day one. As we were building the product, we essentially had very early customers from India like InMobi, Snap-deal, Flipkart, Bookmyshow and Flipkart. So we’ve always been in the Indian market. So our plan has always included India and what we have seen over the last few years, and we, I mean, to some extent we have seen the growth of the internet applications and the mobile applications in India, and we’ve been a huge part of it over the last 10 years.Going forward, we see a great future. We have sup-port, we have people who work with us. Everything that happens in Asia is actually run out of Bangalore. We see enormous growth here this year. We are gonna continue to see that over the next few years. So, therefore, we are investing more in this market.

Advice to the budding entrepreneurs

Start in an area where you are reasonably knowledgeable. But passionation is equally important because a startup by nature is extremely hard, which means there are times when one doesn’t know exactly what to do as you go through this process. So your passion has to be strong enough so that you have the motivation to go through the ups and downs in the first few years. Also, when you are an entrepreneur, there’s always a lot of noise and you don’t know which one to focus on. So having advisors, mentors and reaching out to them is important. It doesn’t mean you have to listen to a par-ticular person and do exactly what they say because that doesn’t work either. Be open and honest about everything, including one situation as well as how you deal with customers and so on.