Solving a difficult problem is what led the founders of Aiven Ltd. to create a new business.

The company’s leaders previously built mission-critical data infrastructure for Nokia Corp. and F-Secure Corp. They discovered that infrastructure solutions had become either proprietary or hard to leverage for tangible business results. Aiven was born out of a desire to make it simple and easy for customers to operate and deploy popular open-source data infrastructure technology.

“Data infrastructure is absolutely pivotal to success of the modern organization, but it’s actually hard to do and particularly hard to do well,” said Ian Massingham (pictured), chief marketing officer of Aiven. “Nobody notices if it’s working well, but you sure notice if it breaks. Offloading that heavy lifting to an expert provider like Aiven, with a technology platform that automates and simplifies the process of deploying, operating and scaling this core data infrastructure tech, is a really, really high value area for customers.”

Massingham spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante as part of theCUBE’s ongoing coverage of AWS and cloud ecosystems and in conjunction with the AWS Summit NYC. They discussed how Aiven is building its data cloud platform to deliver robust open-source capabilities. (* Disclosure below.)

A toolkit for organizations

Aiven provides an open-source data cloud that customers can use to build modern data infrastructure. The company started with the open-source relational database management system Postgres as a managed service across the three largest cloud platforms and has since added 10 other popular open-source services.

“We’ve created a platform that makes it really simple for customers to deploy, operate and scale these different components and also provides out-of-the-box integrations between them,” Massingham said. “It’s a toolkit for organizations of any size that want to build sophisticated and robust data-centric applications featuring data streaming with Kafka analysis, with operational databases like Postgres and Cassandra, and increasingly observability in search capabilities as well with OpenSearch and Grafana.”

Aiven has also been leveraging artificial intelligence for its platform, including a Postgres extension that allows for the efficient handling of high-dimensional vector data.

“Some of the open-source technologies that we support, most notably OpenSearch and Postgres, already have features that have been built into them that are AI powered,” Massingham said. “We just recently announced support for something we call pgvector inside our Postgres service, which allows customers to do similarity search using vector search techniques. It’s very effective for things like recommended systems and can actually link recommended systems with transactional data, such as stocking data.”

Aiven makes a distinction in how its business model is different from open core. In open core, organizations develop open-source products and technologies and give those away to the community, but then they maintain proprietary software around the core and monetize those proprietary components.

Massingham cites an example in which Aiven is working with Amazon Web Services Inc. to develop a new feature for OpenSearch called flat object.

“Our approach is somewhat different,” Massingham noted. “We believe that customers should be able to access all of the components that we need to derive value from open-source technology under open-source licenses. Flat object is a proprietary feature within Elasticsearch, but [for] which we collaborated with AWS to create an open-source, compatible alternative. This makes it easier for customers to migrate to and adopt OpenSearch.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS and cloud ecosystems and in conjunction with the AWS Summit NYC:

(* Disclosure: Aiven Ltd. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Aiven nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE