I’m delighted to announce that we’ve appointed a new CEO, Quentin Gallivan, to lead our company through the next level of growth.

We’ve had tremendous growth at our company in the past 4 years – having grown Aster Data from 3 persons to a strong, well-rounded team and stellar management team, shipped products with market-defining features, working with customers doing fascinating projects across many industries including retail, Internet, media and publishing and financial services and established key partnerships that we’re really excited about. Tasso and I’ll be working closely with Quentin as he accelerates our trajectory, taking our company to the next level of market leadership, sales and partnership execution, and our international expansions.

Quentin brings more than 20 years of senior executive experience to Aster Data. He has held a variety of CEO and senior executive positions with leading technology companies. Quentin joins us from PivotLink, the leading provider of BI solutions, where as CEO, he rapidly grew the company to over 15,000 business users from mid-sized companies to F1000 companies, across key industries including retail, financial services, CPG, manufacturing and high technology. Prior to PivotLink, Quentin served as CEO of Postini where he scaled the company to 35,000 customers and over 10 million users until its eventual acquisition by Google in 2007. Quentin also served as executive vice president of worldwide sales and services at VeriSign where he grew sales from $20M to $1.2B and was responsible for the global distribution strategy for the company’s security and services business. Quentin has also held a number of key executive and leadership positions at Netscape Communications and GE Information Services.

I’ll transition to a role that I’m really passionate about. I’ll be working closely with our customers and, as our Chief Customer Officer, I’ll lead our organization devoted to ensuring customer success and innovation in our fast-growing customer base. When the company was smaller, I was very actively involved in our customer deployments. As the company scaled, I had to withdraw into operations. In my new role, I’ll be back doing tasks that I relish – solving problems at the intersection of technology and usage – and providing a feedback loop from customers to Tasso, our CTO, to chart our product development.

Together, Quentin, Tasso and I are excited to accelerate our momentum and success in the market.

We are very excited to announce a strategic partnership between Aster Data and SAS Institute to further accelerate the “SAS In-Database Processing” initiative.

The objective of the partnership is to integrate SAS software capabilities within our MPP database which Aster Data’s 4.0 release uniquely supports. Last week we announced the capability to fully push down analytics application logic inside our MPP database so applications can now inside the database allowing analytics to be performed on massive data scales with very fast response.  We call this a Massively Parallel Data-Application Server. We had earlier presented more details on this unique implementation of SAS software inside Aster Data’s nCluster software at a co-hosted session with SAS at M2009.

Our architecture enables SAS software procs to run natively inside the database thereby preserving the statistical integrity of SAS software computations while giving unprecedented performance increases during analysis of large data sets. SAS Institute partners in this initiative with other databases too – but the difference is that each of these databases require the re-implementation of SAS software procs as proprietary UDFs or Stored Procedures.

We also allow dynamic workload management capabilities to enable graceful resource sharing between SAS software computations, SQL queries, loads, backups and scale-outs – all of which may be going on concurrently. The workload management enables administrators to dial-up or dial-down resources to the data mining operations based on the criticality of the mining and other tasks being performed.

Our fast loading and trickle feed capabilities ensure that SAS software procs have access to fresh data for modeling and scoring, ensuring a timely and accurate analysis. This avoids the need to export snapshots (or samples) of data to an external SAS server for analysis, saving analysts valuable time in their iterations and discovery cycles.

We’ve been working with SAS Institute for a while now, and it is very evident why SAS has been the market leader in analytic applications for three decades. The technology team is very sharp, driven to innovate and execute. And as a result we’ve achieved a lot working together in a short time.

We look forward to working with SAS Institute to dramatically advance analytics for big data!

I had commented that a new set of applications are being written that leverage data to act smarter to enable companies to deliver more powerful analytic applications. Operating a business today without serious insight into business data is not an option. Data volumes are growing like wildfire, applications are getting more data-heavy and more analytics-intensive, and companies are putting more demands on their data.

The traditional 20-year old data pipeline of Operational Data Stores (to pool data), Data Warehouses (to store data), Data Marts (to farm out data), Application Servers (to process data) and UI (to present data) are under severe strain – because we are expecting a lot of data to move from one tier to the other. Application Servers pull data from Databases for computations and push the results of the computation to the UI servers. But data is like a boulder – the larger the data, the more the inertia, and therefore the larger the time and effort needed to move it from one system to another.

The resulting performance problems of moving ‘big data’ are so severe that application writers unconsciously compromise the quality of their analysis by avoiding “big data computations” – they first reduce the “big data” to “small data” (via SQL-based aggregations/windowing/sampling) and then perform computations on “small data” or data samples.

The problem of ‘big data’ analysis will continue to grow severe in the next 10 years as data volumes grow and applications demand more data granularity to model behavior and identify patterns so as to better understand and service their customers. To do this, you have to analyze all your available data. For the last 5 years, companies have routinely upgraded their data infrastructure every 12-18 months as data sizes double and the traditional data pipeline buckles under the weight of larger data movement – and they will be forced to continue doing this in the next 10 years if nothing fundamental changes.

Clearly, we need a new, sustainable solution to address this state of affairs.

The ‘aha!’ for big data management is to realize that traditional data pipeline suffers from an architecture problem – of moving data to applications – that must change to allow applications to move to the data.

I am very pleased to announce a new version of Aster Data nCluster that addresses this challenge head-on.

Moving applications to the data requires a fundamental change in the traditional database architecture where applications are co-located inside the database engine so that they can iteratively read, write and update all data. The new infrastructure acts as a ‘Data-Application Server’ managing both data and applications as first-class citizens. Like a traditional database, it provides a very strong data management layer. Like a traditional application server, it provides a very strong application processing framework. It co-locates applications with data, thus eliminating data movement from the Database to the Application server. At the same time, it keeps the two layers separate to ensure the right fault-tolerance and resource-management models – bad data will not crash the application, and vice-versa a bad application will not crash the database.

Our architecture and implementation ensures that apps should not have to be re-written to make this transition. The application is pushed down into the Aster 4.0 system and transparently parallelized across the servers that store the relevant data. As a result, Aster Data nCluster 4.0 simultaneously also delivers 10x-100x boost in performance and scalability.

Those using Aster Data’s solution, including comScore, Full Tilt Poker, Telefonica I+D, Enquisite – are testament to the benefits of this fundamental change. In each case, it was the embedding of the application with the data that enables them to scale seamlessly and perform ultra-fast analysis.

The new release brings to fruition a major product roadmap milestone that we’ve been working on for the last 4 years. There is a lot more innovation coming – and this milestone is significant enough that we issue a clarion call to all persons working on “big data applications” – we need to move applications to the data because the other way round is unsustainable in this new era.

Aster Data has seen tremendous growth in North America. We announced today that we have opened a Europe office in West London, England. The office will be headed by Bob Pearson, our newly appointed Europe Area Director. Bob is an entrepreneurial industry leader and had earlier introduced Opsware into Europe, eventually propelling Opsware to be #1 in Europe in its market. We had been in conversations with Bob for 12 months – understanding the European market – before we opened our office this summer.

We also announced today that our first customer in Europe is the #1 online poker gaming site in the world, Full Tilt Poker. We have been working with Full Tilt Poker for 8 months now helping deploy Aster nCluster to power their fraud prevention systems and provide enhanced customer service to their players.

It is no surprise that data size growth is a world-wide phenomenon, and certainly occurs across “the pond” as well. We have noticed that European customers in numerous industries, such as financial services and insurance, online retailing, social networking, communications, and gaming are deploying new (and sometimes custom) applications to leverage big data.

Aster Data is certainly the most application friendly big-data infrastructure in the market, and we look forward to working with our European customers in the coming years!

Netezza pre-announced last week that they will be moving to a new architecture – one based around IBM blades (Linux + Intel + RAM) with commodity SAS disks, RAID controllers, and NICs. The product will continue to rely on an FPGA, but that would sit much further from the disks & RAID controller, beyond the RAM but adjacent to the Intel CPU, in contrast to their previous product line.

In assembling a new hardware stack, Netezza calls this re-architecture as a change but not really a change – the FPGA will continue to offload data compression/decompression, selection and projection from the Intel CPU; the Intel CPU will be used to push-down joins and group bys; the RAM will be used to enable caching (thus helping improve mixed workload performance).

I think this is a pretty significant change for Netezza.

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Rajeev was a close friend and a cherished mentor. We were saddened to hear the news today and we will miss him dearly. Our thoughts are with his family.

We announced today that we’ve raised another $5.1M as an addendum to our Series B.

Institutional Venture Partners (IVP) led this addendum to bring our total Series B raise to $17.1M. IVP is very clearly the best later-stage VC firm in Silicon Valley, and it is great to have them on our side as we continue to grow our company. IVP has backed such enterprises as Netflix, WebEx, MySQL, Data Domain, Juniper Networks, and Akamai.

Steve Harrick, Partner at IVP, led this investment for IVP. Steve has a great understanding of the technology infrastructure companies poised to lead their markets. He has led IVP’s investments at WebEx and MySQL and was recently recognized by Forbes Magazine’s 2009 Midas List as one of the leading venture investors in the US.

We had met Steve during our rounds of Series B meetings in Q4 2008 and had really liked and respected each other. At that point, we didn’t have space for two venture firms – having decided to raise $12M; we decided to separate, promising to keep in touch for the future.

In Q1 2009, as the economy grew more uncertain, we re-visited our decision and realized that it would be more prudent to pro-actively build a bigger cash reserve to ensure that we did not stumble in our growth, even as the market deteriorates, and a recovery continues to inch away.

Steve was happy to step in and participate in Aster at the same terms as our Series B. We were delighted to have a person of Steve’s caliber participate whole-heartedly in our growth.

Finally, there has to be some weird co-incidence in the manner in which all of our Series A and Series B venture capital firm participants (Sequoia Capital, JAFCO Ventures, and now IVP) have been investors in database companies that have had successful returns (Netezza, Datallegro, MySQL).

We announced today that we have raised $12M in our Series B funding.

We’re thrilled that our vision and message have resonated so well in these times when investors have become extremely selective. And frankly that is because our message is resonating so well with our customers: within 4 months of publicly launching the company in May 2008, our customer base had grown to double digits with several of our customers deploying/considering a second production system.

The inside story is that we had scheduled our first meetings to raise Series B for the week of October 5. It turned out to be the week of a perfect financial storm. The week began with Iceland’s currency dropping 30% against the Euro. On October 6, several European governments stepped up to guarantee bank deposits. On October 7, as Iceland and Russia exchanged Yes and No statements on a Euro 4B loan, Sequoia Capital gathered its portfolio CEOs in an auditorium and warned them (and by the power and reach of the Web, every venture capitalist, entrepreneur, executive and journalist) that the time had come to “Get Real or Go Home”. By October 10, the cost of short-term credit had spiraled up and as a result DJI dove to 8,451 from 9,955 at the start of the week, its lowest point in the previous 5 years.

Tasso and I still went to our scheduled meetings to present Aster’s opportunity and our customer adoption, and got invited back. In the next 5 weeks, as the financial markets continued their drop off a cliff, we continued to receive strong interest for investing that matured with multiple term-sheets for us to consider.

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When I can afford a multi-week break, I head home to India. It is really impressive how home refreshes and recharges a person as nothing else does.

India has a burdgeoning media and communications industry. The movie industry is well-known and huge, but in truth the story of media in India in the last decade has been that of television coming of age. Internet as a media channel is still in its infancy here. Even in communications, Internet’s growth is dwarfed substantially by the growth of mobile networks.

The power of media in shaping conversations and spreading awareness really hit home in two separate anecdotes.

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We received a very nice Holiday Card today from one of our investors, First Round Capital, that we helped create.

Rob Hayes visited our office in early December with a hand-held video camera asking us to dance! I was quite nervous us filming the video: I had of course seen Matt’s “Where the hell is Matt” video. The untold back-story is that we’re supposed to just start dancing to an imagined tune: there is no-one keeping beats or playing a song!

The end-result is equal parts goofy and equal parts fun! Happy holidays!!