Why I joined Aerospike

Behind this door lies the next chapter of my professional journey! I am thrilled to announce that today is my first day as the Chief Revenue Officer at Aerospike. Allow me to take a moment to share why I am so enthusiastic about this opportunity.

To begin, what drew me to Aerospike was its cutting-edge technology. Aerospike offers the world’s most massively scalable, millisecond-latency, real-time database. Ironically, despite being in “sales,” I do not have a good poker face when discussing features and functions, so a solid product is essential to me! Aerospike’s fundamental approach is straightforward—a database that allows customers to keep the index in memory while storing the actual data on SSDs. The result: A database that performs with incredible speed and the highest efficiency.  Aerospike’s technology enables customers to typically operate on 80% fewer servers and control costs by separating compute and storage.  

In fact, one particular story that really resonated with me was shared by Venkat Thamminana, Managing Director at Charles Schwab. Their goal was to transition from mainframe to a modern application stack and achieve more than 4X growth. At the time of migrating to Aerospike, they were processing 250M transactions and 2M price updates daily for 10M customers. Following the migration, they reduced their server footprint from 150 to 12, saving them $10,000 a day (or $3.65M a year) just in mainframe offloading. The volume of data managed before the migration was three terabytes, which was expanded to 13 terabytes with Aerospike. And if that weren’t impressive enough, they increased their transactions per second (TPS) from 200K to 1M!  “Aerospike exceeded our expectations,” stated Thamminana, “and became a critical component in the ecosystem.” Now, that’s a product you truly can stand behind!  

Additionally, the company is poised for future success. Aerospike recently secured another round of funding exceeding $109M and underwent a remarkable rebranding effort (kudos to the marketing team!). With this substantial investment, what's on the horizon? Aerospike just unveiled an enterprise-grade vector search solution for AI. The more massive the AI training dataset, the greater the value and accuracy the AI/LLM solution will deliver. Aerospike is uniquely positioned to emerge as the database of choice when handling massive datasets.  

Finally, let’s talk about the incredible team at Aerospike. Subbu Iyer had me at hello - a visionary with boundless passion and an impressive track record in marketing and product, having honed his skills at HP, Oracle, and Riverbed. Then there’s Srini Srinivasan, CTO and Founder, whose simple yet profound explanation of what sets Aerospike apart left me in awe (pure genius!). Frank Days, CMO, also hailing from another DB vendor, provided me invaluable insights into why he chose Aerospike and who, with his team, did exceptional work on the rebranding during my interview process. Last but not least, board members Tim Connor of NewView and George Kadifa of Sumeru Equity Partners, who proudly shared why they decided to invest further in this remarkable company.  

I am excited about the opportunity to be part of the leadership team at a company that’s going to shape the future of the database industry. Thanks to everyone at Aerospike who took the time to get to know me during the interview process. I look forward to this next journey together!