On Simplicity

For me, that word is “simplicity.”  It flashed in my brain momentarily and stayed with me as I was preparing my keynote for our annual user conference in San Francisco. At the event, we had many conversations around what's needed to solve the biggest of big data challenges — and how to be ready to deliver on the promise of the AI revolution. Throughout them all, the word of the day was simplicity.

When I came to the helm of the company five years ago, the data landscape was complex and getting more so. Customers were grappling with too many fit-for-purpose databases that didn’t play well together and couldn’t keep pace with large datasets that refreshed frequently. And with  OLTP and OLAP on separate islands, reasoning and analysis were too far from transactions. 

Many wondered how much a database could do to solve these challenges. At SingleStore, we knew all of this could be overcome, and we set ourselves a mantra: Simplify.

We weren’t the first to think of it. Many of the world’s greatest thinkers have cited simplicity as the ultimate form of sophistication.

Poet Walt Whitman called it the glory of expression.

Fashion designer Coco Chanel found it the keynote of all true elegance.

And architect Mies van der Rohe famously noted that less is more.

In that context, “less” doesn’t mean deprivation or lack. It’s about winnowing and curation —  clearing away the extraneous so only the truly necessary shines through. And that has always been the mission and the purpose of SingleStore. We were founded as a way to bring order to complexity and tame the Wild West of data.

From 2011 until now, we have taken step after step to simplify the data estate, take the noise out and combine many workloads into a few. You can see the key product and feature milestones on this chart, as well as the financial investments we’ve made to keep innovating while de-risking the platform for you.

But as Charlie Chaplin rightly observed, simplicity is not a simple thing; it is difficult to achieve and harder still to maintain. So we’ll never stop seeking new ways to perfect the experience for you, our customers and users.

Recently we announced our integration with Snowflake, and during the conference we announced our acquisition of the Australia-based data integration platform, BryteFlow, further expanding our capacity to ingest data from a wide range of sources like SAP, Oracle, Salesforce and many more. We’re integrating BryteFlow’s capabilities into our core product to complement our existing functionality, creating an experience known as SingleConnect. 

The arrival of SingleConnect makes it faster and easier to tap into an array of enterprise data sources, tackle diverse and challenging workloads, and deliver top-notch experiences for your own customers.

All of these announcements and developments are related: they are all in service of offering you greater and greater levels of simplicity. That’s valuable in itself — but also matters for AI, which   functions best when it has three key building blocks: speed, scale and multi-model workloads. With these three things, AI can work at the enterprise level — and because SIngleStore excels at all three, we confidently say that we are natively engineered for AI.

Whether you need this simplicity for your daily data challenges or for the most futuristic of AI applications, the ultimate benefit is the same: SingleStore is an easier car to drive. We make your data estate, SaaS platform or modern application ready to support decisions at the speed of reality.

Or as I like to say, at the speed of Now. 

Our recent integrations, partnerships and features are just the start. When it’s time for the next user conference, you can count on us to have done even more to simplify your experience. As the sculptor Auguste Rodin once said, “The more simple we are, the more complete we become.”

I love that thought because it speaks to the meaning behind our name, SingleStore — a single store for all information, where we can find a completeness that augments human capability and frees us up to do our best thinking, designing and building. What higher purpose could there be?