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On SingleStore Now. Q&A with Madhukar Kumar

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Q1. Can you anticipate which new product announcements will be announced at SingleStore’s annual AI conference?

We’ll be announcing some strategic news tied to our long-term vision that will open SingleStore to a wider ecosystem in the world of data and one that we believe will significantly create an elevated and simplified experience for our customers. We’ll also have four product announcements: One under general availability, one public preview, and two private previews. 

Every announcement is about streamlining connections in and out of SingleStore to help customers simplify their data estates and ready them for the next 3-5 years of using data at enterprise scale and employing it for AI innovation. We continue to take the waste out of all these processes, and our announcements will reflect that. 
 

Q2. What are the main challenges when scaling AI across the enterprise?

Data is the true substrate for intelligence and eventually the main differentiator for an application given that LLMs have fast become commodity. In enterprises, managing this data requires ensuring safety, accuracy, privacy and doing it on a massive scale while keeping the latency down for building any modern applications. These are now the same challenges for scaling AI across enterprises.

Q3. Raj Verma, SingleStore CEO, is quoted saying that “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” What does it mean in practice in this context?


Rising data volumes, new data types and database proliferation have created a data landscape that is far too complex. It’s a tangled ball of yarn that slows down decision-making and makes it harder for developers to do their best, most innovative work.

Meanwhile, demand for data-driven insights only continues to rise, especially in the age of AI, where efficiency, transparency and reliability are precursors for success. And customers want and need those insights faster and faster.

So it’s a complex landscape. And the thing about complexity is, it simply does not scale. 

We need to equip organizations to cope with large, fast-moving data, transactionally and analytically, and to do so without having to duplicate data or move it around. Conquering complexity through speed, scale and multi-model workloads has been SingleStore’s mission from the beginning and something that we continue to refine to this day. Many of our announcements at SingleStore Now will be about how we continue to increase the ease of use.  

Historically, one of our customers’ biggest challenges has been bringing their data to SingleStore from sources like SAP, Oracle, SQL, etc. Once their data is in SingleStore, we are blisteringly fast. It’s getting data into SingleStore that is the challenge. And this is where we continue to simplify.

Our mantra has always been, “if we can make it easier, let’s do that first.” Since our founding, we’ve invested $300 million and delivered improvement after improvement to get us ever closer to the elegance of true simplicity and our vision of being a single store for all customer information. 

Q4. SingleStore recently announced its native integration with Apache Iceberg. Why is this important for generative AI?

In the world of enterprise data management, a large portion of data is typically locked under proprietary storage formats. With the adoption of Apache Iceberg, companies don’t need to be locked into one specific technology or company. This is the reason why we were one of the first real-time databases to add integration with Iceberg data. Now the same data can be queried in milliseconds at petabytes scale that was earlier locked or frozen in large data lake houses only for batch analytics. This same data is now also available to AI applications in real time that would not have been possible without Apache Iceberg and SingleStore’s integration with it.

Q5. You also launched a so-called dot_product Accelerator AI Program for AI startups in the Asia Pacific region. What is it? And who can participate in this program?

As part of SingleStore’s vision to advance the development of AI in Asia and around the world, we’ve created this program to help startups in the Asia Pacific to develop world-class AI applications.

The APAC region is poised to be a major player in AI, with governments and businesses in India and Singapore in particular, investing heavily in this space. SingleStore’s goal for the accelerator program is to help startup communities develop cutting-edge AI technologies through the best and most responsible use of data. Eligible startups can apply for SingleStore credits to help build, grow and scale their missions.

AI is nothing without data and speed, so SingleStore has a considerable role to play in helping the promise of AI come to fruition. Programs like dot_product accelerator can help democratize AI innovation around the globe by making data easier to use.

Q6. What are the benefits of participating in this program?

It streamlines the path to getting up and running with AI. Instead of having to cobble together solutions with combinations of MongoDB and Pinecone or Postgres and PG vector, SingleStore can provide a one-stop shop, giving users the ability to experiment with what a new AI application could look like with SingleStore. Participants will get access to the only database that can act as a single store for all AI applications. Benefits include SQL + JSON, fast read/writes & analytics, vectors and advanced keywords and the immediate availability of data upon ingestion.

Q7. How do we learn more about this conference and register?

The event is for anyone who wants to take a deeper dive into the process of building intelligent applications at enterprise scale. We’ll be asking and answering questions like, “What does building these applications require? How do you operationalize your data models to build fast…and scale even faster?” The conference will be organized around three elements of the enterprise AI stack: the foundation, the data ecosystem and the platform. 

Regarding the foundation, participants will learn the key requirements for building enterprise-grade AI solutions and must-have features for AI architecture, with an emphasis on how companies are using AI agents and frameworks.

In the data space, we’ll consider real-world use cases as we examine how to build intelligent, product-grade applications that take all data into account, with a lens on real-time AI applications that use technologies like Snowflake and SingleStore.

And last but not least–we’ll focus on the platform, including building a complementary LLM stack and using software development kits (SDKs) for creating rich, AI-first user experiences. Top industry experts will share their take on the future of AI agents and frameworks, such as Llamaindex and LangGraph. Participants will gain a better understanding of the middle layer that connects data sources to intelligent applications through hands-on sessions and demos. 

It’s an action-packed day, recommended for developers, engineers, architects, CTOs–anyone interested in taking AI to enterprise scale. 

You can register at https://events.singlestore.com/singlestore-now-2024

Qx. Anything else you wish to add?

As we enter year three of AI, I am extremely optimistic of how AI is changing the tech landscape around us. We have always been at the forefront of becoming the single data store for all information and, now more than ever, this has put us in an increasingly fast moving and evolving arena of AI. I could not be more optimistic about what companies can now build on their data. 

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Madhukar Kumar, chief marketing officer at SingleStore 

Madhukar is a developer turned growth marketer and an expert in product-led growth (PLG) with more than 18 years of experience leading product management and marketing teams. He has successfully implemented PLG at Nutanix, Redis and DevRev, and is a guest lecturer at Duke University on PLG and new product development.

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