The pandemic has brought a period of transformation across businesses globally, pushing data and analytics to the forefront of decision making. Starting from enabling advanced data-driven operations to creating intelligent workflows, enterprise leaders have been looking to transform every part of their organisation.
SingleStore is one of the leading companies in the world, offering a unified database to facilitate fast analytics for organisations looking to embrace diverse data and accelerate their innovations. It provides an SQL platform to help companies aggregate, manage, and use the vast trove of data distributed across silos in multiple clouds and on-premise environments.
The Origin Story
Nikita Shamgonov co-founded SingleStore (then called MemSQL) in 2011 with an aim to build a modern database to help companies scale. The company started with just ten engineers and has now grown to over 300.
In MemSQL, mem refers to in-memory transactional rowstore, and SQL signifies the potential to achieve speed and scale using simple and easily understood declarative statements.
The company’s first product was focused on transactional concurrency that would ultimately lead to the next big thing in databases. At the beginning of the last decade, large memory hardware and RAM costs dropped drastically. Due to this advancement, building an in-memory transactional database that can fit the entire dataset became cost-effective.
The Journey from MemSQL to SingleStore
In the following years, MemSQL swiftly emerged as a leader in NewSQL, a new approach to relational databases that combined transactional ACID — atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability. MemSQL was also one of the first systems to offer NewSQL along with features such as lock-free data structures, MVCC, code generation, k-safety and replication.
Over the next few releases, the team added several new features and capabilities such as columnstore, JSON as a native data type, geospatial types and functions, and times-series. By adding data science and machine learning model integration, the company forayed into operational analytics — a new set of database requirements for achieving competitive advantage for the modern enterprise.
With the introduction of new features, MemSQL moved beyond providing just in-memory database solutions to using a more advanced and sophisticated storage approach that leverages modern cloud and hardware innovations. Currently, in-memory makes up only five per cent of the company’s revenues.
The company felt its original name — MemSQL — suggested cost-intensive implementation when the reality was quite the opposite. Implementations were now one-third the cost and ten times greater performance compared to competitive products such as Oracle. In October 2020, MemSQL rechristened itself as SingleStore, a name that resonated with the company’s value, performance and vision.
CEO Raj Verma expressed the direction in an earlier interview with TechCrunch. “We wanted a name that could be a verb. So, down the road, we hope that when someone asks large enterprises what to do with their data, they will say ‘SingleStore It!’ That is the vision,” said Verma.
The name is based on a conceptual idea of its proprietary technology. The company is now working toward helping businesses embrace digital innovation by operationalizing all data through one platform. SingleStore is the world’s fastest unified database for data-intensive applications, and the true north star of the company is to deal in all types of data without workload segmentation.
SingleStore will be accessible from anywhere globally, offering companies greater flexibility and simplicity in cloud data management.
What’s New?
The year 2021 started on a good note for SingleStore. With a recently secured funding of $80 million, the company announced a few high-profile hires in a bid to strengthen its core executive bench.
Earlier this year, Oliver Schabenberger joined the team as the Chief Innovation Officer, who was previously the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer at analytics and AI firm SAS. Further, in an attempt to navigate the company through this period of hypergrowth, the company has also appointed Suresh Sathyamurthy as the Senior Vice President of Marketing & Growth.
In terms of partnerships, SingleStore has collaborated with several businesses such as Infosys, HCL, TCS, CRG Solutions, and Bahwan CyberTek via its Partner Program. Recently, the company joined hands with SAS, AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Aurze.
Earlier this month, SingleStore hosted a LinkedIn Live event to reveal a watershed moment in the database industry. The company announced the birth of a new database category as the next phase of growth.
“Never before has a company architected a database for both analytics and transactional workloads — and without compromising on performance, efficiency or flexibility,” said SingleStore CEO Raj Verma during the launch. “SingleStore provides the world’s only highly performant, hybrid multi-cloud database that unifies analytical and transactional workloads. In introducing this, we’ve created a new category that will define the future of databases and data platforms.”
Recognised as the top leader in Database-as-a-Service and relational databases categories by TrustRadius, the company is taking bold strides in creating an all-data-one-platform ecosystem for the growth of digital innovation.
The SingleStore Launch Pad — an innovation centre to identify technological solutions for forward-looking product enhancements — “is the latest proof point of SingleStore’s commitment to innovation that helps our customers and partners achieve more with data and analytics,” stated Oliver Schabenberger, who is anchoring the effort.
Data management and analytics are poised to be one of the fastest-growing services in the future, and SingleStore is all armed to play a big role in it.
