2018 was Aerospike’s best year ever. One of those slingshot years, where you look back and say, that was one of the catalyst moments where our years of hard work took us beyond startup to market scale. 

Our success is the culmination of a multiyear strategy that pushed the boundaries of database performance and reliability to match the aggressive adoption of mission-critical edge applications. Petabytes of scale. Billions of transactions. Streaming data from millions of endpoints. All with the reliability that’s allowed customers to run and expand production Aerospike databases for years with no service disruption or performance degradation. Other solutions require a vastly more complex and costly to manage infrastructure, with two to three times or more as many servers to get our balance of scale, performance and reliability.

We’ve always prided ourselves on our forward-looking, deep technical roots and we released a series of milestone innovations this year. This included the industry’s first non-relational database with strong consistency and high performance – Aerospike Enterprise Edition 4.0. This watershed release allowed us to credibly compete in a much broader swath of enterprise-class, mission critical applications and further distance us from legacy NoSQL vendors by adding verified strong consistency to our industry-leading performance, reliability and scale. Enterprise Edition 4.3 expanded the tiers of storage we support to include all flash in addition to in-memory, and hybrid memory giving customers the flexibility to choose the storage architecture they need as well as the economics to use Aerospike for petabyte scale deployments. And finally, Aerospike Enterprise Edition 4.5, released in December, is the first commercially available open database to support Intel’s new Optane DC persistent memory, demonstrating our innovation in leadership and enabling us to leapfrog the competition once again.

Our progressive delivery of new innovation matches the aggressive data-driven business innovations our customers are racing to deploy in financial services, media, e-commerce, Ad Tech, gaming and other top markets. They need to harness an onslaught of data from a variety of systems – especially the flood of information from edge devices – as part of strategic digital transformation initiatives. A majority of these initiatives are driven by applications embedded with machine learning and artificial intelligence to drive the type of hyper-personalization their customers demand.

Making it easy for our customers to deploy these new edge-based applications without replacing or disrupting existing operational systems has been a core tenet of our success and one key reason we have maintained such high customer retention. And our success has not gone unnoticed, with a nearly five-star Gartner Peer Insight review rating that any of our prospective customers can refer to when evaluating Aerospike as a vendor.

There are exciting things ahead, too, all supporting the rapidly increasing footprint of Aeropsike within the enterprise. You can hear about all of this at our upcoming Aerospike Summit ’19. Last year’s summit was phenomenal, with more than 100 customers (including PayPal, Adobe, AppNexus and ThreatMetrix) sharing the details of their digital transformation journeys. You’re planning on joining, right? See you there!