How Aerospike strategizes with data in the customer experience battleground

In a freewheeling conversation with Dataquest, Lenley Hensarling, Chief Product Officer at Aerospike talks breaks it down the importance of real time data, how it enables decisions for a lot of enterprises.

Hensarling also throws light on how Aerospike’s platform bridges the gap in businesses and helps them with enhanced and targeted customer experience, and the competitive differentiator of Aerospike that helps it stand out in this fast-saturating space and ‘Right Now’ economy.

Edited excerpts:

Talk to us about the necessity of real time data and how it enables decisions for a lot of enterprises.

Two things driving the demand for real time computing are - machine to machine with IoT coming up, predictive maintenance and machines talking to each other, doing transactions to some extent, and that's at machine speed. That puts an additional demand beyond what we've experienced in the past, across a broad range of solutions; The second and the one people usually think of is that when we interact with our computers, there's a growing sense of instantaneous response.

With COVID much more activity has gone online and that showed us the need to be able to handle what we call the non-linearity of the internet. We have to be able to scale up to take advantage of those types of things, which means some companies have grown exponentially, that could meet those demands. Some companies who didn't have the visibility, have not fared as well, and have not had the ability to scale.

The other thing I will say is that as we more and more provide assistance through Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the game has become - how fine grained a model can I have to drive decisions.

How does your platform solve these gaps that exist in the business and enable them to provide a better enhanced customer experience?

What we can do is provide data in a single millisecond. You say, “I need to do a query and find this out” and you can get it back in a single millisecond. When you are logging in, you expect to go in seamlessly without friction and we can supply that frictionless experience, while still doing many, many, many transactions and lookups and applying a lot of data to that solution. What we do is create time in that business process for that application that our customer has written, because if we can take 20 milliseconds to do all the data handling that gives them another 80 milliseconds to do something else.

What is your competitive advantage in the market?

We're doing it really in two ways: At scale with many of our competitors, we can say we can do things fast. Some can say we can do it at scale or we can scale out. We differentiate by being able to have that predictable performance, even as you scale up.

The other big differentiation is we do this in a cost-effective manner.

When you look at our architecture, the database is at the core, but we have also built connectors into technologies like Kafka counterpart to Kafka pulsar, into Spark which is good for AI and ML into Presto Trino.

We announced a partnership with Starburst, a company that delivers this so that you can look at data across all your databases, or look at database NOS with SQL, but really, providing visibility into our data and providing connectivity into the broader data pipelines that a company might have.

What we've done is make sure that we're completely enabled, regardless of the technologies that those customers are using to plug in data mesh into those data pipelines.