The founders of Aiven built their expertise by managing critical data infrastructure for major businesses, such as Nokia Corp. and F-Secure Inc., and they noticed that solutions had either become proprietary or challenging to implement and achieve meaningful business results.

Instead, they built their new company around an open-source data cloud that organizations could use to build modern data infrastructure. Today, that infrastructure increasingly relies on large language models and artificial intelligence to drive business outcomes.

“Building a large language model or educating and training a machine is only as good as the data you put in it or make available for it,” said Elena Zykova (pictured, right), vice president of global partnerships at Aiven. “It’s not only the availability of data, but its relevance, it’s the format it comes from, security, compliance. These are the discussions we have with most of the customers who are in AI.”

Zykova spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Rebecca Knight at the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. She was joined by Jonathan De Jong (left), senior vice president of engineering at GLOBO Language Solutions LLC, and they discussed how GLOBO is pursuing an AI agenda and the tools to support that initiative. (* Disclosure below.)

Doubling down on AI

GLOBO, a provider of translation and interpreting services, is seeking to integrate AI throughout its business operations. The company has been focused on enabling organizations to communicate with their customers in any language by leveraging a simple platform.

“We’ve doubled down on AI, we’ve decided that we want to be the AI leader in our industry,” De Jong said. “We really want to augment what our teams are doing to make them better. How do we find workflows that don’t need an interpreter that we can introduce AI to make it better?”

To help answer that question, GLOBO turned to Aiven for assistance from the 11 open-source technologies available on the Aiven platform. The platform includes tools such as Apache Flink, which provides a library of machine learning APIs and infrastructures, and ClickHouse, an open-source column-oriented database management system.

“[ClickHouse] is a super powerful tool when we talk about AI and the big amounts of data,” Zykova noted. “It’s an analytical database that can handle things extremely fast.”

With a portfolio of open-source projects at its disposal, Aiven is in a position to tailor solutions to fit a particular client’s needs. This includes a thorough evaluation of the customer’s IT landscape and the ecosystem of suppliers in which it moves.

“I put the customer in the center, and then I map out who the customer is interacting with, obviously the hyperscalers and their data solutions portfolio,” Zykova said. “How do I integrate with that to make it a better experience, a smooth integration for the customer? That’s really the definition of who we want to engage with so that it brings the most value to the customer and decreases that noise so it’s not confusing what to choose while you have the options clearly mapped out.”

For GLOBO, partnering with Aiven and with Amazon Web Services Inc. has been an important ingredient in building a highly available platform.

“Whether it’s Aiven, whether it’s Amazon, it’s trying to find partners who think like us, who are trying to solve problems like us,” De Jong said. “I like to say we collect databases at GLOBO; we have a lot of different databases we work with, and the reason is because no one database can do everything. What we look for is finding things that fit the solution we are trying to actually achieve.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event:

(* Disclosure: Aiven sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Aiven nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE