John Furrier and Jeff Kelly, theCUBE co-hosts for Day 3 of BigDataSV Conference in Santa Clara, welcomed Brian Bulkowski, Founder and CTO with Aerospike, to talk about the Big Data market dynamics and the Aerospike value proposition.

“The value for in-memory is really amazing,” stated Furrier, inviting Bulkowski to talk more about the current hype around in-memory – compared to the industry situation from a year ago.

“In-memory has been great to us and to the industry as well,” said Bulkowski. “The big power of in-memory is that you don’t have to spend as much time, as a developer, optimizing for all of those rotational problems, you don’t have the slowness associated with it, instead you have the agility in your processes to be able to keep changing your app over and over again and adapting. That’s why companies like Apple, Facebook and Google have placed such value on in-memory, in general.”

Trends and new announcements

“What we’ve seen at Aerospike is the growth of flash in that area. A lot of folks still say that in-memory is going to be RAM; I saw an analyst this week who said that a TB of RAM costs a million dollars to host and have in your data center. When you take into account power and everything else, a TB is a million bucks. Flash doesn’t cost that. Flash cost 4 or 5 thousand dollars, maybe 10 thousand with all the power associated with it. Flash is the way that in-memory is going,” said Bulkowski brimming with confidence.

“People are hot on data and data-driven software and In-memory is key for that,” said Furrier. “How has the world changed for you? What have you done to take Aerospike in-memory into mainstream?”

“We are releasing today a Node.js client. Node is one of the most popular platforms in high performance because you can scale-out laterally and because you can keep the language the same between any browser-based applications and your server side,” clarified Bulkowski. “A lot of DevOps developers love Node. What you need underneath to make it ‘sing’ is a really fast database. Aerospike with Node.js is great for doing operational stuff.”

Bulkowski announced that “a couple of weeks from now we’ll be open sourcing yet another tool, which is a recommendation engine based on non-contextual systems.”

“The focus a couple of years ago was on Hadoop and Hadoop ecosystem,” noted Kelly. “How do you see the conversation change, from your perspective, as a real-time database company? Are we starting to get to the point where the community understands that the real-time is a critical part of this larger ecosystem architecture that we’re building for the future of data management?”

“We ran a meet-up a couple of months ago and a guy working for Wal-Mart said that, in the first year of using real-time on their website, they got a lift of $1.2 billion in sales.”

Aerospike is also involved with NoSQL and Kelly wanted Bulkowski to talk to the audience more about this aspect of their business.

“At Aerospike we’ve always believed in polyglot databases. We were at the first NoSQL Conference in 2009, and we’ve always seen it as the beginning of the polyglot databases. There’s nothing wrong with SQL, except that it’s not the perfect fit for every language.”

On open source in the enterprise

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Talking about open source, Bulkowski admitted the most fascinating thing about it is trust. “Enterprise needs to be able to trust their database vendor and a lot of their core technology vendors. If you make a bet on the infrastructure, you have to trust that company and trust their source code. Seeing and understanding that source code is key to the trust that gets created.”

“What do you have to do to be successful, both from the product standpoint and from communicating it to the target audience?” asked Furrier.

“The fact that we have so many great customers doing massive deployments and massive scale without advertising in media has always been great for us. Word-of-mouth has always been the most critical aspect of selling enterprise infrastructure. Having those reference customers as well as having the trust from source code availability is key,” said Bulkowski.

Watch the entire segment below.