With COVID-19, Digital Transformation Plans are Accelerating

The impact of MemSQL means companies can now do things that they weren’t able to do before — on any previous platform.

Already reputed as the “The Database of Now,” San Francisco-based MemSQL is adding enhanced manpower and funding punch to its arsenal. Weeks after securing $50 million in new non-dilutive financing, the budding operational analytics company added to its tech talent roster with the arrival of Jordan Tigani as MemSQL’s new Chief Product Officer. He comes to MemSQL after a decade at Google, where he was one of creators of the Google BigQuery cloud data warehouse.

A leader in powering modern applications and analytical systems, MemSQL’s cloud-native database is seeing increased use with companies across countless sectors. “The demand we are seeing in this COVID-19 world is that this type of funding is helping us accelerate our growth trajectory to become even more of a global data player,” says Raj Verma, co-CEO of MemSQL. “Jordan’s hiring, along with other key executive roles we’ve announced, is a strategic component of our next phase of growth.”

The company’s ability to provide speed and scalability across its architecture will blossom further with Tigani on board. “This new approach to the architecture — with a large amount of CPU, memory, and disk, all scalable across multiple machines – finds MemSQL in an ideal spot for this modern approach,” Tigani explains.

“We have the ability to tie together the way things used to be done with the way things are being done now, in the modern cloud era. We are positioned to do things and go places, technologically, that no one else in the market can do. We can go places that they just can’t go.”

With its main base in San Francisco, and offices in Portland, Seattle, Boston, Lisbon, and London, MemSQL (memsql.com) has discovered its industry reach is increasing with its growth.

“Financial services is a big vertical for us,” Tigani says, “because these companies recognize that faster insights are valuable for them as a competitive differentiator. If these companies can make more informed strategic decisions faster than their competitors, they can turn that into a sales opportunity and make better trades.”

In the wealth management segment, MemSQL runs the platform for managing the portfolios of ultra-high wealth individuals. Additionally, it facilitates trades on its algo-trading platform for some of the top banks in the world. In addition to financial services, industries ranging from media to telecom to retail, energy, and IoT are all looking to take advantage of the “MemSQL difference.”

Major telecom companies are also using MemSQL in their 5G roll-out. Understanding the masses of data generated in real time is not negotiable, and to do this the system must be able to scale across a massive number of devices.

“Without MemSQL,” Tigani says, “pulling real-time insights from vast amounts of data would’ve been much more difficult. They realized they needed this technology. Without it, the transition would be much, much harder, and take a lot longer.”

Jordan Tigani lands at MemSQL as Chief Product Officer after a decade at Google, where he was one of creators of the Google BigQuery cloud data warehouse.

The ability – if not a growing need – to operate in real-time is the MemSQL allure for companies seeking to compete in an increasingly data-driven world. There are certainly choices out there, but none that are natively built to process data in quite the same way. For companies that want results right now – that need The Database of Now – MemSQL delivers.

MemSQL helps the largest electronics conglomerate in the world manage their real-time insights. One of the largest telecoms conducts network telemetry with MemSQL’s platform, and one of the largest ride-sharing companies in the world manages its business analytics with secure real-time insights into the business with MemSQL.

The fast-growing gaming industry – seeing even a further boom amid the months of pandemic-driven sequestration – is well along in the race for enhanced operational analytics. “Gamers are a great use-case example for MemSQL, because these gaming companies want the power to be able to make fast decisions within the game,” Tigani says. “In order for a hot game to respond to users, and to process in-game action and commerce, changes need to be able to be made quickly, so users don’t get bogged-down. These companies want to be able to make adjustments, quickly, automatically and at scale.”

Despite the increased need for speed, most companies are still playing real-time catch-up.

Tigani explains: “There is a trend toward real-time analysis as more and more companies are recognizing the competitive impact of real-time insights. Unless you understand what’s happening now with your business –companies need something that scales, is immediately updatable, and can provide rapid drill-down. It’s about having the ingestion speed and the query speed – and companies who are doing this well have discovered the competitive value in making decisions more quickly.”

If there is one common thread across all of MemSQL’s customers, it is that it delivers the insights that enables companies to optimize their business at one-tenth of the cost of existing, slower solutions, and with an incredibly quick time to value.

“Now these companies can do things that they weren’t able to do on any previous platform,” Verma adds. “For example, one of the largest mobile communications providers in the U.S. could only do one report a day, a task that usually took 14 hours, when they came to us. With MemSQL, they now have an up-to-the-minute real-time dashboard. The unit economics are far better with our offering, regardless of the size of the company.”

Tigani, meanwhile, sees more growth ahead for MemSQL, as global businesses seek cost-saving measures during these fickle economic times.

“The industries — and the verticals — we’ve been involved with are ones that are weathering the pandemic fairly well,” remarks the new Chief Product Officer. “Companies want to control their costs, and we’re far more affordable than some of the other options.”

As Verma adds, “The pandemic ideally positions MemSQL for the world’s enhanced focus on digital needs. COVID-19 has not been a headwind for us, it has been a tailwind. Decision-makers who postponed their digital transformation plans are now accelerating, and MemSQL is an integral part of their transformation, delivering breakthrough time-to-value.”

The coronavirus crisis has catapulted MemSQL ahead as an immediate asset for businesses. “The first thing is preserving privacy,” Tigani explains. “We worked with True Digital – the largest telecom provider in Thailand – on ‘contact tracing.’ They needed something up-and-running very fast. They went from nothing, to having a live website with dashboards in two weeks. They had a million cell phone movements per second, which was sent to their cloud; they wanted real time, geo-spatial understanding to help prevent people congregating and lower the threat of the virus spreading.”

The world’s current transformation of lifestyles is moving in concert with MemSQL’s growing abilities.

“From a customer perspective, the more our customers work from home, the more they need to be in the cloud. They don’t want to have these big data center footprints and they want to control costs,” Tigani says. “Businesses want to cut down on the number of systems they have to deal with, and because we can do both transactions and analytics – and combinations of these two – we help businesses simplify their tech stack.”

Judd Spicer, Senior Writer, California Business Journal

Judd Spicer is a Business Feature writer, Host of the Spicer Speaking Podcast and Co-Host at The Press Box Radio Show for ESPN. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota.