Brian Bulkowski – founding CTO of Aerospike Inc with John Furrier

Hadoop provides a highly efficient means of storing and processing unstructured data, but for all the buzz surrounding the project, it doesn’t address the equally burning need to make the results available to users when they need them – which these days means on the spot.

For that, companies have to turn to vendors such as Aerospike Inc., whose founding CTO Brian Bulkowski recently returned to theCUBE to share how his firm is marrying the capabilities of its speedy NoSQL database with the batch processing framework to help clients become more competitive.

On the morning of the Oct. 17 interview, Aerospike introduced a Hadoop connector that allows users to apply historical insights from their back-end clusters to real-time data stored in its namesake platform without having to shuffle all the relevant information back and forth before every operation. That unlocks a new level of optimization that Bulkowski said can help consumer-facing companies deliver the kind of experiences their audiences have to expect from the likes of Amazon.com Inc. without breaking the bank.

“The pressure is top-down because those Internet companies are coming after all the retailers and all the enterprises out there,” he told hosts Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. “Of course they have to respond, and the first thing they’re doing is going after that technology stack.”

Aerospike is seeing especially large demand for its database from the retail sector, where Amazon poses a tangible threat to traditional brick and mortar operations. According to Bulkowski, the platform is helping established retailers level the playing ground against the e-commerce giant on many key fronts, including pricing and advertising. The new connector ups the ante even further, making it possible to pipe down insights produced in Hadoop to users in the form of targeted ads and other services in seconds.

“That’s information that’s coming out of your Big Data analytics but then you need to react moment-to-moment. That’s what people expect,” Bulkowski detailed. “You can’t take your iOS app and call Hadoop so you need a database in the front, and that’s Aerospike.” The same functionality is proving just as valuable for advertising firms such as AppNexus Inc., he added, which provides an ad exchange where companies bid on placement opportunities in real-time.

Bulkowski said that the AppNexus, which is valued at over $1 billion, relies on Aerospike to handle the millions of transactions coursing through its marketplace every second. He boasted that AppNexus switched from a competing database that provided the necessary performance but couldn’t keep up with the firm’s explosive growth, a recurring story within its user base. The founder expects this current momentum to continue as new technology trends coming out of Silicon Valley, notably the Go programming language, drive organizations to adopt a more real-time approach towards managing their data.

Watch the complete interview (22:18).