There has been a lot of turmoil this past week in Financial Services. Several good people had their projects stalled, or even lost their jobs, due to market forces beyond their control.

I’d like to call out to Quantitative Computer Scientists who have been affected. If you are good with data and know how to extract intelligence from it, we want you in our team!

We are hiring. You’ll have the chance to work with a number of our customers and help them do more with their data. You’ll bring a fresh perspective to the business processes at our customers; in turn, you’ll gain from learning about the business processes of various verticals. An invaluable education when you want to go back to Financial Services after the crisis has passed in a couple of years.

Drop us a note at careers [at] asterdata [dot] com. We’d love to hear from you!

We took a decision early on in building the company that we’d make our platform open in technology and have an inclusive philosophy on business.

I am glad to say that this year we have started delivering on our business philosophy.

We have good relationships with several smart consulting teams, and are actively working with them to bring innovative solutions to the market for our joint customers. We recently recommended a partner to a company where we were not a good fit because we felt that our partner could bring a lot of value to the prospect and that such introductions strengthen our extended network. We were genuinely surprised at the warmth it generated at both the company and the partner for us!

In the last few years, we’ve actively built our product to work on a variety of hardware platforms: we have customers running IBM, HP, Dell, and even white-box offerings! Earlier this week, we announced our partnership with Informatica. You will see a series of announcements appearing in the next few months.

We are actively looking for a person who can lead our efforts in establishing meaningful partnerships in the data warehousing space. If you know one, or are one, who shares an inclusive philosophy, drop us a note!

I am glad to share the news that one of our first customers, MySpace, has scaled their Aster nCluster enterprise data warehouse to more than 100 Terabytes of actual data.

It is not easy to cross the 100TB barrier, especially when loads happen continuously and queries are relentless, as they are at MySpace.com.

Hala, Richard, Dan, Jim, Allen, and Aber, you have been awesome partners for us! It has been a great experience for Aster to work with you and we can see the reasons behind MySpace’s continued success. Your team is amazingly strong and capable and there is a clear sense of purpose. Tasso and I often remark that we need to replicate that culture in our company as we grow. At the end of the day, it is the culture and the strength of a team that makes a company successful.

And to everyone at Aster, you have been great from Day 1. It is impressive how a fresh perspective and a clean architecture can solve a tough technical challenge!

Thank you. And I wish everyone as much fun in the coming days!

Have you ever discovered a wonderful little restaurant off the beaten path? You know the kind of place. It’s not part of some corporate conglomerate. They don’t advertise. The food is fresh and the service is perfect – it feels like your own private oasis. Keeping it to yourself would just be wrong (even if you selfishly don’t want the place to get too crowded).

We’re happy to see a similar anticipation and word-of-mouth about some new ideas Aster is bringing to the data analytics market. Seems that good news is just too hard to keep to yourself.

We’re serving up something unique that we’ve been preparing for several years now. We’re just as excited to be bringing you this fresh approach.

My name is Mayank, and I co-founded Aster Data Systems with George and Tasso in 2005.

Shortly after incorporation, the three of us were eating lunch at a Chinese restaurant and out popped a fortune slip from a cookie reading:

Indeed. The Internet is changing the speed at which we communicate, processes are being automated to react and execute in the blink of an eye, and data is playing a key role in guiding execution. Analysis of data is moving front-and-center, breaking out of the passive world of warehousing and reporting, as applications create intelligent processes, and companies live-and-die by their ability to monetize their data.

A new set of applications are being written – or waiting in-the-wings to be written – that will leverage data to act smarter. Consider the rapid evolution of online advertising networks: in the past 5 years, we have seen a spate of successful companies carving out a niche for themselves in the market. Their differentiation? The unique ability to match advertising inventory with consumer segments. Their basis of differentiation? Data!

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