In an exclusive conversation with CXO News & APAC News Network, Khushal Bhansali, Country Manager – India & South Asia, Aerospike explains how Aerospike’s high-performance database leveraging AI can cater to Indian enterprises.
What are the solutions and services currently in the Aerospike portfolio that are available in India?
All Aerospike products that comprise the Aerospike multi-model database platform are available to our customers in India. These include our core database, along with our key-value, vector, and graph offerings and variety of integrations for streaming (such as Kafka and Pulsar) as well as Elasticsearch. Aerospike also offers a fully managed DBaaS and a cloud managed service on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
How does Aerospike’s high-performance database cater to Indian enterprises?
Like enterprises across the globe, Indian enterprises are facing an onslaught of data that they must ingest in real-time – at scale – for a variety of use cases, such as fraud detection, banking and payments, ecommerce, AdTech, and fantasy gaming. Likewise for digital native use cases, such as user profile data, customer 360, session data, recommendation engines, dynamic pricing, real-time payments and always-on relational augmentation layer.
Many companies today are using artificial intelligence to power these applications. However, the amount of data they need to process is exploding, and the diverse range of sources this data comes from makes it hard to manage. Traditional databases struggle to effectively handle it all, so enterprises have a difficult time fully exploiting the full value of data for their business.
Aerospike differs from other databases by offering the lowest latency and highest throughput at extremely high scale. Our platform consistently uses vast amounts of data to enable better, just in time decision-making, maximize operational efficiency, lower costs, and reduce infrastructure – in some cases by up to 80 percent with no loss of performance. Our roster of customers includes major Indian companies, such as InMobi, Myntra, Flipkart, PhonePe, and Dream11.
What are the potential use cases of these solutions across different verticals?
We have had tremendous success in the banking and payments, ecommerce, fantasy gaming, AdTech and e-commerce sectors, where customers have built highly scalable, real-time solutions powered by Aerospike – I mentioned several of these customers above.
Beyond these industry sectors, public sector needs are continuing to grow and evolve, and Aerospike is beginning to work with these companies as well. A key focus for us is to sign on strategic partners to help customers adopt Aerospike seamlessly and quickly.
How does Aerospike’s core transaction, analytics, and AI solutions, including vector and graph databases, meet the demands of enterprises in the AI domain?
As mentioned, the ability to ingest, store, and quickly process a huge influx of real- time data from many different sources is crucial for powering AI models. Aerospike is uniquely suited to handle AI/ML workloads because our real-time platform can efficiently manage all that data and serve it up quickly at scale and in the proper context. This is especially important with the rise of GenAI and large language models, which tend to hallucinate.
In addition, as a multi-model database, Aerospike’s ability to offer key-value, document, graph, and vector on the same platform means we can act as a flexible and extensible AI data platform. Our graph and vector databases, for example, work well together for a variety of AI use cases, such as semantic search, enabling discovery of new connections in knowledge graphs, or using semantic clustering on graphs to allow for better cross-entity reasoning.
Aerospike can also incorporate Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to enhance the retrieval of relevant information, improving the quality and accuracy of AI-generated content by providing context to large language models, which helps to reduce hallucinations.
How does Aerospike today differentiate itself in the highly competitive database solution provider landscape?
Data infrastructures of the past were not built for today’s real-time business. Businesses must deploy technology that is both reactive and predictive in real time to make instant decisions. Of course, there are many traditional NoSQL systems, several of which are open source, but there are different tradeoffs. Most don’t have Strong Consistency for data, or if they do, their throughput is low, or they can’t scale. Or even if they do scale, they require a burdensome number of servers, so even with free licenses, the server, power, and staff costs tend to stifle agility.
Unlike those systems, Aerospike delivers predictable performance, scales from gigabytes to petabytes, is strongly consistent, and offers unparalleled cross- datacenter replication for a true globally distributed real-time database.
What are the key pillars on which Aerospike’s GTM strategy rests in India? What are some of the key initiatives under this strategy?
Aerospike’s go-to-market (GTM) strategy in India revolves around several key pillars and initiatives. These pillars collectively support Aerospike’s objective of becoming a key player in India’s rapidly evolving digital landscape:
- Leveraging the India Stack: Aerospike aims to support the development of solutions on the India Stack, which includes the country’s digital infrastructure like Aadhaar (digital identity), UPI (Unified Payments Interface), and other government-backed digital initiatives. This helps in enhancing last-mile connectivity and improving digital services.
- Vertical Focus: Aerospike concentrates on key verticals such as fintech, telecom, and e-commerce. These sectors are crucial in India’s digital transformation and present significant opportunities for Aerospike’s real-time database solutions.
- Fintech: Aerospike provides solutions to improve transaction speeds, enhance fraud detection, and ensure scalability in financial services.
- Telecom: The focus here is on improving network performance, real-time analytics, and customer experience management.
- E-commerce: Solutions are aimed at optimizing search performance, managing inventory in real-time, and personalizing user experiences.
- Partnerships and collaboration: Aerospike works directly with customers and through strategic partnerships to implement its solutions. This includes collaborating with local technology firms, system integrators, and other key players in the ecosystem to drive adoption and integration of its technology.
- Innovation and localization: Aerospike emphasizes developing and tailoring its technology to meet the unique requirements of the Indian market. This involves solutions to handle local data challenges and regulatory requirements.
- Customer success and support: Ensuring robust customer support and success strategies is crucial. Aerospike invests in providing high-quality support and engagement to help customers realize the full potential of our technology.
What are the dynamics of the strategic partnerships that Aerospike has embarked on for its growth in India?
Strategic Partnerships are critical for Aerospike’s products to reach a larger audience in the India market. This includes OEM/solution partners, with Aerospike as part of their solution stack and system integrators who work with customers on key problem areas where Aerospike can help.
Together with our partner Mindgate, for example, we’ve enhanced real-time payment (RTP) systems for India’s financial services sector. With Aerospike, Mindgate has achieved significant milestones, including a 25% increase in transaction throughput and the seamless handling of 7 billion digital payments per month.
What is the overall channel structure that Aerospike currently follows in India? How are these differentiated between distributors, ISVs and SIs?
Channel Partnerships are driven by a regional Channels team, who work closely with these partners to not only onboard them, but to continually keep them trained and skilled in Aerospike. Key industry verticals and use cases are jointly worked on with a clear GTM Strategy. Regional partnerships consist of SIs, resellers and distributors. Globally, strategic ISV partnerships are in place with CSPs, including AWS, Google, and Azure as well as Red Hat, HPE, and Wipro. Many others are also in-progress.
What are going to be Aerospike’s key focus areas in the next 12-18 months?
Of course, AI is a significant market opportunity for many companies, including Aerospike. As I discussed, our platform is well-suited to meet the needs of AI- based infrastructure and applications. With the rise of AI, vector has become crucial, especially for similarity searches. We will be releasing our vector product soon, and it will drive many use cases like hyper-personalization and recommendation engines. Our three key areas of development for vector include:
RAG (described earlier); multi-model AI applications for multi-model queries within a single database to create richer and more integrated applications; and continuous learning, where models are continuously updated and used in decision-making processes.
We will also be adding Multi-Record Transaction (MRT) support, where Aerospike will support transactions in a distributed yet performqant way. This will be extremely helpful in India, where scale has outgrown what traditional transactional databases can offer.
Finally, as we announced earlier this year, we closed $114 million in funding and plan for a big portion of this to go towards investing in R&D and innovation. Much of this will take place in India given the remarkable talent we’ve found here.
Rajneesh De, APAC News Network
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