With a fresh new $20 million funding round in its pocket a new distribution strategy built on open source licensing, database startup Aerospike is bidding to become a major player in a market segment that some people believe will be the future of enterprise database management.

Aerospike makes a NoSQL, flash-optimized in-memory database that the company claims delivers superior speed, scalability and reliability. It is typically used between a Web application and a Hadoop cluster to  capture and organize large amounts of information for analysis.

Aerospike is already a key player in the advertising and marketing spaces, where its database technology is highly regarded for its ability to serve millions of transactions per second. Now it’s signaling its intent to expand into other areas where low latency and speed are critical, including financial services, retail and travel. With the markets for flash memory and Big Data surging, Aerospike is  bidding for market share at what it hopes is the right time.

NoSQL’s rise in the enterprise

Although still a relatively new technology, NoSQL is now used by 16 percent of 500 enterprises surveyed by Tesora. Dwight Merriman, CEO and founder of 10gen, wrote last year that NoSQL will become “the preferred database technology for the vast majority of use cases, with document databases increasingly capable of handling as much as 80 percent of database workloads.”

An important, yet rarely discussed part of NoSQL’s enterprise strength, lies in the role it can play in helping to make Hadoop ‘enterprise ready‘. Several players are attempting to combine Hadoop with NoSQL in order to facilitate that. A recent Wikibon report, “Big Data: Hadoop, Business Analytics and Beyond”, notes that HBase is often deployed on top of HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) to provide low-latency, quick lookups in Hadoop. Rival provider Couchbase has also looked at ways to integrate NoSQL with Hadoop, and Aerospike’s plan to build connectors for more open source data platforms, including Hadoop, is another stake in the ground.

“The missing piece of the Hadoop puzzle is accounting for real-time changes. Hadoop can give powerful analysis, but it is fundamentally batch-oriented,” said J. Chris Anderson co-founder of Couchbase, in an interview with ODBMS.org.

Will open-source open the floodgates?

Facilitating Hadoop is one way of attracting new business, but removing the costs of entry will entice more  potential customers.  Open sourcing is a gamble in some respects. “Pure-play open source companies never survive. That’s a law of nature,” wrote Cloudera’s Chief Strategy Officer Mike Olson on LinkedIn recently.

But giving tech away for free has advantages too. As Wikibon analyst Jeff Kelly noted in an earlier post on SiliconANGLE, it enables a developer to take advantage of community innovation, lowers the barrier to getting a foot in the door with potential customers and makes it easier for vendors to align with established channel partners to open up business opportunities.

At least some high-profile investors like the odds. The Series C funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates and included  Columbus Nova Technology Partners, Alsop Louie Partners, Regis McKenna and private investors.

Wikibon’s Kelly acknowledges that Aerospike’s move is a gamble, but he also believes it can pay off. “Aerospike has significantly lowered barriers to adoption, which will help it expand into more verticals and use cases,” he said. “Aerospike is betting that new users, once they try the database, will find it to be the highest performing NoSQL database for real-time operational analytics and quickly move to paid subscriptions.”

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