Digital Champions: Building the Future In Real Time

By Thomas Been, DataStax

Bringing a promising idea to life with an application that solves a hard problem or creates an amazing experience (or does both)—this is the developer’s dream. But even if that dream comes true, real success can only be achieved if the groundwork has been laid for high growth.

DataStax set out to identify enterprises and builders that define the future of data and have planned and prepared to scale to whatever demand their growing businesses and customer bases place upon them.

These “Digital Champions” have built data-driven, high-growth businesses. They are the visionaries and driving forces in using real-time data and the cloud to deliver unprecedented value to their organizations. As you’ll read below, the hard work, vision, and ingenuity of these builders has led to significant success and recognition for their organizations.

It’s not easy. Developers are often hampered by the laundry list of challenges that can stymie growth, productivity, speed, and innovation, including data silos, technical debt, and data architectures that aren’t scalable.

The first four in the DataStax Digital Champions series—Overstock, Temporal, Alpha Ori, and Uniphore—have overcome these hurdles thanks to their use of modern data technologies to build and run fast-growing, real-time applications that delight consumers and power businesses. Read on to learn more about their journeys, and keep an eye out for upcoming Digital Champions.

Overstock

While at Overstock, Devin Bost played a key role in building an organization-wide data fabric to leverage real-time data to help the online retailer expand into new markets, provide a powerful experience to its customers, and ultimately drive shareholder value.

Bost, the company’s former senior data engineer, explained how Overstock’s data architecture handles extremely high volumes—it processes between four billion and 10 billion events per day—and expects to expand that significantly.

The company’s prowess at harnessing real-time data made them a shoo-in to earn the title of Digital Champion.

Learn more about why Overstock is a DataStax Digital Champion here.

Temporal

Temporal’s superpower is making life easier for developers. It does so by offering a workflow orchestration engine: Enterprises provide the business logic and Temporal handles all the parts that require specialized expertise, like persistence and resilience.

So it’s no surprise that the company’s platform, built by CTO Samar Abbas and his Temporal co-founder Maxim Fateev, has experienced rapid success and high-growth in the three years since the company was launched. Its open-source software code is used by the likes of Netflix and Instacart, and just this year Temporal secured a $103 million Series B round that put its valuation at $1.5 billion.

We’re proud to recognize Temporal as a Digital Champion.

Learn more about why Temporal is a DataStax Digital Champion here.

Alpha Ori

With approximately 90% of world trade transported by sea, Alpha Ori Technologies recognized a great opportunity to apply cutting-edge, real-time information solutions to the maritime transportation industry.

Cofounded in 2016 by Praveen Viswanath, the company’s platform offers intelligent analytics, alerts, and insights from data gathered from over 260 vessels. The results have been impressive, says Viswanath, who is Alpha Ori’s chief architect: since inception, the platform has saved its users an aggregate 44,000 metric tons of fuel, resulting in an aggregate $5 million in cost savings and preventing the release of 137,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide.

The results have garnered Viswanath glowing recognition. He recently received the Constellation Supernova Award for business transformation.

We are pleased to recognize Alpha Ori as a Digital Champion.

Learn more about why Alpha Ori is a DataStax Digital Champion here.

Uniphore

Uniphore’s Saurabh Saxena knows that when it comes to winning new customers, conversations are the most important asset—and huge volumes of real-time data are key to generating value from that asset.

Founded in 2008, Uniphore offers a platform that analyzes sentiments with AI in real-time. Saxena, who is Uniphore’s head of technology and vice president of engineering, explained how his company’s platform seamlessly captures and processes about 200 data points on every meeting participant’s face at 24 frames per second—this can add up to 4 million records generated in a single meeting.

Uniphore’s innovation has generated explosive growth, and its promising future has garnered continued interest from the investment community (the company earlier this year announced a $400 million funding round that boosted its valuation to $2.5 billion).

DataStax is proud to have helped Uniphore handle the massive volumes of real-time data that its platform generates, and is pleased to recognize the company as a Digital Champion.

Learn more about why Uniphore is a DataStax Digital Champion here.

We’re honored to partner with companies like Overstock, Temporal, Alpha Ori and Uniphore on their journey to success with high-growth applications and platforms, by speeding their time to market and ensuring that their data architectures have the runway to scale to whatever their success throws at them.

Does your organization fit the Digital Champion mold? Contact me to nominate a Digital Champion today!

About Thomas Been:

Thomas leads marketing at DataStax. He has helped businesses transform with data and technology for more than 20 years, in sales and marketing leadership roles at Sybase (acquired by SAP), TIBCO, and Druva.

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