Brian Bulkowski, Founder and CTO of Aerospike, stopped by theCUBE at Oracle OpenWorld 2013, to be interviewed by John Furrier and David Floyer.

Asked by Furrier for his take on in-memory, Bulkowski jumped at the occasion to boast his company’s support, right from the moment Aerospike was founded. Five years ago they were sure that rotation disk would soon have a niche, and that niche would be decreasing. Bulkowski stated that the revelations at Flash Memory Summit a month ago were simply staggering. “Rotational disks have a smaller and smaller role to play, and well-crafted software can really take advantage of in-memory computing, not just for key value store usage and fast analytics, but for both.”

Oracle’s entry into In-Memory validates the market

That is exactly why Furrier wanted to talk to Bulkowski on theCUBE, because, when everyone was waiting on industry sidelines, Bulkowski was clearly a pioneer of in-memory. With Oracle jumping on that market, one might suspect the market has matured, as Oracle is not known for making hasty, risky decisions, joining a certain trend only when it’s been tested long enough. Floyer was interested if such move would validate or freeze the market for the likes of Aerospike.

“The move validates the market for us. We’ve been beating Oracle NoSQL in the field with customers for nearly a year and a half now,” reckons Bulkowski. “That’s based on price, performance, not wanting to deal with Oracle’s sales people, and based on the uptime and reliability we have.

“Reliability is huge. Once you have customers like we do, running thousands of SSDs, large scale deployments with zero downtime and hundreds of terabytes in storage – that’s the kind of lead we have in terms of being in the market place,” boasted Bulkowski.

“Oracle hits the market at a decent point, but I wish their product was a little bit better,” said Bulkowski with a large smile. “But they’ll get there, eventually.”

Floyer understood that Oracle’s move signaled that “they want to carve out a single platform, both on the hardware point of view and software point of view, and integrate everything – as much as they can.”

“If they can make it work and if they can make it attractive, packaging an app in a way that minimizes the cost of maintenance, they will take a chunk of that market. But it’s all going to be about execution, over the next two or three years. I think the next three years is going to be a very interesting time in the Oracle base,” predicted Floyer.

Security benefits new Flash tech

Outside the advertising industry, some of the most innovative work in Bulkowski’s opinion is in security. There are various types of security: transactional security in banking, fraud in advertising, fraud in online gaming, and basically everywhere that involves money.

“The ability to put up a Hadoop cluster that is looking for the big picture patterns – if I see this, that probably means fraud – and then have a real-time flash-oriented NoSQL database on the front side, looking at everything that’s going on, that’s what I see winning the fraud battle,” said Bulkowski. “SQL was used in fraud, and 80% of the market is still using it. But the companies that placed a bet on Hadoop are doing so much better in detecting fraud at a reasonable price.”

Aerospike is doing well at the moment, having released Aerospike 3 that has secondary index capability, real-time map reduce, with all the usual capabilities of flash support and flash integration.

“We’d never seen such an enormous influx of change in capability and innovation that’s happening in the industry at the moment,” noted Floyer. “It’s like the dead weights of the disks that were holding everything back have finally fallen.”