Thought Leaders in Big Data: Adam Wray, CEO of Basho (Part 1)

Real-time, distributed data availability for Big Data use cases is a key issue. Here, we speak with Adam Wray about the nuances.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as Basho.

Adam Wray: I’ve been raised in companies like Akamai and Limelight Networks. I actually worked for Amazon for several years before starting my own company, but it’s always been in the cloud services space or trying to use some form of what used to be called ASP. I came to Basho via that path with the understanding of what distributed systems mean to your data being moved all over the world.

Sramana Mitra: What does Basho do?

Adam Wray: Basho is focused on a distributed systems challenge. We’ve spent the last five years trying to sort through the complexity of maintaining a highly accurate and available environment where your data might be in multiple geographies. Our core product is called Riak Core and we’ve done that for some of the largest companies in the world because they care about the accuracy and the availability of their data in a very performant manner whether that’s read or write.

Where we’re going with that is we’ve built on top of many data models because each work load might have different expectations for their performance – fast read, simplicity, linguistic needs. We focused on delivering key value on object and now, we’re expanding that to use in-memory search and analytics as well. The challenge for enterprises is they want to use these different models but the ability to keep it simple to use, synchronized, replicated is really tough. We want so simplify that and work on the higher level value of their applications and allow the data tier of unstructured data, regardless of use and the need to be able to be handled by one platform.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a couple of customer use cases. First, tell us what kinds of customers are you going after? What are your primary target segments?

Adam Wray: We have just between 200 and 300 clients right now. They’re typically large enterprises. Some of the verticals in which we’ve excelled are technology, retail, manufacturing, media and entertainment, healthcare, and telecommunications. In this space, we get a consistent theme with our clients. Because we can handle many different use cases, clients are typically coming to us with one production level set need.

We usually aren’t the ones to come to the table, and they’re using it because it’s simple and easy. We get pulled in when the client realizes that they’re going to deal with a huge amount of unstructured data. It could be expanding based on the topline level needs of the business. They’re not sure where it’s going to end. This is a great example of where we might get pulled in.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Adam Wray, CEO of Basho
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