Our tech empowers customers to instantly fight online fraud

AVEEKSHITH BUSHAN, Regional Director & GM, APAC Aerospike

Mountain View, California-headquartered Aerospike has been in existence for 10 years globally and for eight years in India. Its revenues and customers have doubled in the Asia Pacific region over the last two years as companies embrace data-rich digital transformation innovations for a competitive advantage. “Our continued investment in the APAC region has enabled us to deliver both the solutions expertise and the data platform to power mission-critical applications for e-commerce, digital payments, fraud prevention, customer 360, real-time recommendation engines, and other instant decisioning applications,” Aveekshith Bushan, regional director and general manager, Asia Pacific, Aerospike, tells Sudhir Chowdhary in an interview. Excerpts:

What is the kind of customer momentum the company has seen in India?
Aerospike is trusted by leading enterprises around the world to help them confidently deploy mission-critical, strategic operational applications that make digital transformation possible. We work with a number of companies in India including Airtel, Jio, BookMyShow, Flipkart, Snapdeal, PhonePe, Paytm, DBS Bank, Naukri.com, BigBasket, Ola, Dream11, etc. Each of these customers use us in key strategic initiatives that require high scalability, high availability, high levels of security, while keeping their total cost of ownership to the minimum. For example, identifying fraud when making a payment transaction online or with a credit card.

Our patented technology is built to handle massive amounts of data in real-time at the lowest possible latencies, and this is one of the reasons why it is ideal for real-time systems such as these.

As an example, Airtel has built a customer 360 program on Aerospike which provides a single view of all their customers across all the services they have subscribed to, along with their activity and preferences. This helps Airtel customise their customer facing platforms to the needs and preferences of each user, while providing them opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell newer features.

Any specific sectors you are targeting in the Indian market?
The applicability of Aerospike is across industry, specifically in use cases where there is a constantly growing customer base or application requirements. This is especially true in a highly competitive yet fast growing market like India, where customer experience is critical to one’s ability to retain a customer and to grow the user base. In the last two years we have seen massive adoption in telco and BFSI segments in areas such as fraud prevention, real-time payments, Customer 360, etc. The online commerce, high technology and advertising technology industries continue to adopt Aerospike in mission critical real-time use cases such as recommendation engines, user profile data, segmentation and loyalty, to name a few.

What kind of business opportunity do you see in the country?
While companies in India continue their digital transformation journey, driven by consumer-driven innovation, Aerospike is fast becoming one of the key technology levers that they are using to accelerate this transformation. The need for highly performant, scalable and reliable applications that can service the needs of such a large and diverse market, is adding to this ever growing need for such a platform. We are already seeing huge requirements for such a platform in key financial, telecom and new technology companies in the country, and this should only accelerate, as we start seeing things returning to normal post pandemic.

Has Covid-19 impacted your business?
Our business has more than doubled in India in terms of revenue despite Covid-19. We grew in terms of customers and our resources as well. Additionally, with the need for active data centres to provide for the highest levels of availability, customers are beginning to use Aerospike across data centres to cater to their BCP requirements. This is especially true after the serious data centre outages that a few organisations faced late last year, where the need for such a platform is now more than ever. We are very bullish about our prospects in the Indian market over the next year or so.