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Dave: OK. Here we go.
I'm Dave Feinleib. We're here with another episode of Big Data TV brought to you
by bigdatalandscape.com. Today I'm here with Bruce Fram,
CEO of Aerospike. Bruce, welcome to the program.
Bruce: Well, it's great to be here with Dave.
It's always great to see experienced old friends doing exciting things,
you are, with Big Data.
Dave: Great. Well, Bruce, tell us what you're up to here at Aerospike.
Bruce: Well, Aerospike is a more significant company,
you may not realize, than many Fortune 500 companies.
That surprises many people. How could such a relatively small company have such a high
impact on the world? I'll ask you this,
Dave. Is the Internet important to you? Dave: Of course.
Bruce: Of course the Internet is important to you.
Dave: Can't live without it.
Bruce: You can't live without it.
And what funds the Internet? Dave: You tell me.
Bruce: Advertising funds the Internet.
Interestingly, Aerospike's database is used by virtually every major advertising provider in the world.
As we all know, ads fund the internet.
Dave: Right. Bruce: Thus, without Aerospike,
you wouldn't get many ads, and you might look at that as a good thing.
. . Dave: Right. Bruce: every time,
but our technology is used by many of the large,
really, I'd say almost all of the large ad providers that are behind companies,
such as eBay, behind companies such as Ford,
behind companies such as Microsoft.
When you're on these sites and you're seeing ads,
when you're seeing mobile ads, when you're seeing video ads,
these are all being served up by Aerospike customers.
That is a very impact on all of us,
because without those ads, the internet as we know it literally wouldn't be here.
Dave: Tell us what that is.
Is it an appliance? Is it software? How do people buy this,
and typically, what are they spending on it? Bruce: Well,
basically what they do is, we're a software company.
You can download our software on the internet.
We have a free version, I encourage you to download it in there.
They're buying software, but it is specialty database software that it's both very fast,
very reliable and very scalable.
Now, that sounds common. Dave: Right.
Bruce: Let me put it to you this way.
We ask our customers - I have - "Why'd you buy from us?" Every database
company's fast, scalable and reliable.
Dave: Yeah. Bruce: What they say to us is,
"You're the only one that does all three.
Lots of database companies can be fast.
Some can be fast and scalable.
Some can be scalable, but you're the only one that does all three." The evidence
I use for this is that that's true is our customers.
The last thing the world needed was another database company.
Let's not kid ourselves. Dave: Yeah.
Bruce: Let me be blunt.
This is not what the world needed.
The only reason our customers have bought from us is because we had the only
solution on the market for high speed,
high scale, real time internet media processing.
Dave: Yeah. Bruce: We're the only ones.
Dave: Yeah, and what is it that enables you to deliver on those three things?
Bruce: I think that the thing is,
the founders of the company, including one of whom used to run Yahoo! mobile know
the space very well. They know the space as users.
It's actually, although they're technologists, they all discovered the need for the Aerospike database when
they were at different companies, one at Aggregate Knowledge,
one at Yahoo! First of all,
they understood the pain from a user perspective,
and there were not technologists to go do this.
The second thing was, they had the guts to write a database from the ground up.
This was not a database that came from somewhere else and was repurposed and done
from this. Srini and Brian, they decided,
"We're going to write this from the ground up in C.
They did things like incorporate SSDs into the database design from day one.
We don't use paper tape anymore,
we shouldn't be using disk anymore.
Dave: Yeah. Bruce: They decided for speed and scale,
we're going to combine memory and SSDs into a lot of very difficult technical work
to take advantage of the new technology that others just haven't.
Dave: That's great. You've raised some money.
. . Bruce: Absolutely. Dave: .
. . from NEA, Draper Associates,
and Alsop Louie. What are you doing with the funding? Bruce: Well,
I think the biggest thing you'll see with the funding is we did rebrand the
company. Last September we relaunched.
We used to be called Citrus Leaf.
We relaunched as Aerospike, which is the top of a rocket.
At the very top of a rocket there's a little disc on it that makes
it go just a little bit faster.
Dave: That's the. . .
Bruce: On our website, we occasionally get hits from people looking to become astronauts.
I'm not kidding on that, saw one there.
We've rebranded the company and really created a lot more market presence than we had
before, selling much more internationally, put out a community edition.
The company's been selling software for money,
did not have a free version,
which is very unusual in this world,
just had an evaluation version.
Now we get thousands of downloads a week off our free version.
We want people to start using our technology because they need to know what's out
there. Many more people would use our technology if they could just try it and
touch it. Just getting the word out there has been very,
very key for us. Dave: That's great.
The next few years of big data,
real time, a lot of talk about that.
What else do you see, and what are your predictions for the years ahead? Bruce:
Well, we really see two big things that are driving our customers.
The first thing is something we call hot data.
The idea is doing analytics to make real time decisions.
This is not data warehousing.
This is not business intelligence.
That's where an analyst goes, does queries against the data,
lots of data, gets an answer in an hour or two,
or even two minutes. For us,
we mean hot data. We mean the data you've seen in the last 24 hours
that enables you to make a decision,
like, we know Dave is now in New York City.
Now he's in a hotel.
Let's send him an ad or direct him to a store on Fifth Avenue.
That's hot data, as opposed to looking at you,
what have you bought over the last day,
week or year. Dave: Hot data is really recent data,
the last 24 hours? Is that what makes it hot? Bruce: It's recent data,
the last 24, 48 hours, combined with some historical data.
Dave: OK. Bruce: We have to know what your buying habits are historically.
We see that you're in New York.
We see you're walking down Fifth Avenue with a location-based mobile service.
Dave: Yeah. Bruce: Bam-o! Let's direct you to a store on Fifth Avenue.
Dave: Great. Bruce: There's lots of things there.
It's not only advertising. Think about things in security.
Dave: Yeah. Bruce: That is going to be,
that is all about hot data doing lots of analytics very,
very quickly and making computer decisions.
It's also about making decisions, having machines make decisions,
as opposed to having people make decisions.
Dave: Yeah. Bruce: This is about people making decisions,
and that's great. Hot data is about machines making decisions and taking actions at a
speed and with amounts of data that nobody else could go do.
Dave: Yeah. You're saying hot data.
What's the second thing? Bruce: I think the second big thing we're going to see
in the next three to five years is the internet of things.
That is a common thing that people talk about,
but it's really exciting. You look at what's going to create lots more internet devices
and lots more traffic. It's not financial securities.
That's done. It's not trading.
It's not the end nodes of computers,
or even mobile devices. Yes, mobile devices might double the amount of data,
double, triple the amount of data in devices over the next three years in the
internet. That's exciting, but what's going to make it 100X is going to be when
you have 100 devices in your home,
or 100 devices, or thousands of devices in internet plants,
or devices on the cameras here,
or devices in your shoes, which you're already seeing.
That is going to multiply the amount of traffic on the internet by 1000 X,
not 3X, not 5X. 3X and 5X,
we know how to. .
. Dave: It's several orders of magnitude.
Bruce: Several orders of magnitude.
It's not going to happen tomorrow,
but I think if we say five years from now,
the numbers we look at now,
and our customers process billions of transactions a day,
it's going to be, I don't know if it's going to be a trillion transactions,
but it's going to be a lot more than this.
That's what orders of magnitude is about.
Dave: Well, Bruce, thanks so much for being on the show.
Great to see you. Bruce: Hey,
a pleasure to see you, Dave.
Thanks. Dave: OK. Dave Feinleib with another episode of Big Data TV at bigdatalandscape.com.