Complementary capabilities
Data ingestion and integration have always been part of SingleStore’s platform.
Founded in 2011 as MemSQL before changing its name in 2020, the vendor began as a database specialist that competed with the likes of MongoDB and Couchbase before adding more data management capabilities and evolving into a data platform vendor.
One constant throughout its evolution has been a focus on speed and enabling near real-time analysis.
Throughout 2022, SingleStore raised financing — a total of $146 million in a two-part Series F-2 funding round — that was used, in part to fuel product development.
The following year, the vendor unveiled a series of capabilities aimed at enabling customers to develop and deploy real-time AI models and applications, including vector search and a new compute layer. This year, SingleStore continued to invest in enabling real-time analytics and AI by partnering with Snowflake and integrating with Apache Iceberg.
It was amid its funding in 2022 — 10 days after unveiling the first part its Series F-2 round — that SingleStore introduced its initial CDC capabilities.
CDC is the process of identifying and capturing changes made to data and then delivering those changes to other applications in real-time.
For example, if there is a change to a dataset within a database or application such as HubSpot, for example, that change is immediately sent to whatever analytics and AI applications are informed by that dataset. The intent is to inform decisions and actions by using the most current data available.
The acquisition of BryteFlow adds to SingleStore’s existing CDC capabilities by providing prebuilt data integration tools — which include CDC — for applications such as SAP and Salesforce. In addition, BryteFlow’s platform includes prebuilt data integration tools — also including CDC — for data storage platforms from vendors including AWS, Databricks, Microsoft and Oracle that might be used in conjunction with SingleStore to inform AI and analytics tools.
As a result, BryteFlow’s platform serves as a complement to SingleStore’s existing tools and the eventual development and launch of SingleConnect will represent improvement for SingleStore, according to Aslett.
“The acquisition of BryteFlow and its CDC capabilities enhances SingleStore’s ability to support real-time analytics,” he said. “The incorporation of BryteFlow’s functionality … as SingleConnect complements and extends SingleStore’s existing investment in data integration [with] enhanced functionality to support applications that rely on real-time processing and analysis from multiple data sources.”
Raj Verma, SingleStore’s CEO, noted that the vendor already enables users to ingest and analyze petabytes of data in real time. Acquiring BryteFlow is aimed at making it easier by adding full CDC capabilities connected to new data sources.
“This acquisition effectively widens the choices for our customers, offering them more ways to connect to a broad range of enterprise and SaaS applications in addition to databases across on-premises systems and all major cloud service providers.” Verma said.
The impetus for the acquisition, meanwhile, came from SingleStore’s ongoing effort to simplify data movement across various systems, he continued, noting that most enterprises use multiple databases to store information.
“Without streamlined data estates, it’s difficult for organizations to build intelligent and generative AI applications with the full breadth of their data,” Verma said. “We will continue to refine our data platform to make it easier for enterprises to store, transact, analyze and search data from any source.”
While SingleStore’s acquisition of BryteFlow specifically target SingleStore’s data integration capabilities, market trends are favorable for the vendor and could help spur growth, according to Aslett.
Enterprises are continuing to place greater emphasis on real-time analysis. Meanwhile, as enterprise interest in AI — and generative AI, in particular — also increases, data management tools that can handle high-volume workloads at without losing performance speed are important.
“Industry trends are playing to the strengths of SingleStore and its ability to support data-intensive applications,” Aslett said. “Interest in hybrid data processing has risen steadily, driven by demand for real-time data processing to support the development of intelligent operational applications that deliver personalization and contextually relevant recommendations.”
What’s ahead
With the acquisition of BryteFlow now complete, SingleStore will focus its product development roadmap on continuing to simplify data migration and management, according to Verma.
In particular, the vendor aims to make it easier for enterprises to operationalize the data needed to feed and train AI and machine learning models and applications.
“We’ll make it easier for organizations to ingest data into our platform and build intelligent applications at scale,” Verma said.
Aslett, meanwhile, suggested that SingleStore needs to improve its messaging to better compete with more established data platform vendors, including tech giants such as AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft that provide data management services.
Specifically, better messaging around SingleStore’s support for unified data management and analytics workload processing and its advantages over deploying specialized tools for each would benefit the vendor.
“The company is competing with some of the biggest names in data platforms and data processing,” Aslett said. “Adoption relies on enterprises understanding suitable use cases for products able to support hybrid operational and analytic processing.”
Eric Avidon is a senior news writer for TechTarget Editorial and a journalist with more than 25 years of experience. He covers analytics and data management.
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