Aiven’s managed services capabilities bring the best of open-source data technologies to multicloud enterprises

With a core portfolio of platform services, Aiven meets the needs of developers, partners and the cloud-native enterprise  

Aiven was founded in 2016 by a team of open-source and cloud experts based in Helsinki who sought to develop a data management platform that capitalizes on the needs of more mature customers who are increasingly leveraging open-source software. As such, many of Aiven’s clients come already knowing what they want in terms of stream processing frameworks, databases, search engines, visualization and analytics. The core driver of value is Aiven’s ability to orchestrate data on a single management platform, which entails getting customers up and running with minimal deployment lag and enabling the integration with existing tool sets on any cloud. The dedication to a robust support model and transparent pricing with lower costs than many competitors are additional underlying factors that position Aiven to continue growing on pace with the expanding Database as a Service market (DBaaS); for reference, in just the last eight months the company has doubled in size to about 150 employees and is backed by a strong venture capital engine, including the company’s latest round of Series C funding worth $100 million, as well as solid new and recurring revenue streams.

Despite coopetive dynamics, Aiven benefits from allying with leading hyperscalers to support clients’ need for multicloud

As multicloud is a core component of its value proposition, Aiven provides customers availability by partnering with all three major cloud service providers (CSPs), including Amazon Web Services (AWS) (Nasdaq: AMZN), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Google Cloud (Nasdaq: GOOGL). In addition to Aiven’s services being made publicly available on the marketplaces of both Google Cloud and AWS, these relationships allow Aiven to provide enterprises with a way to build the services and applications that are enabled by databases on leading public cloud infrastructures, as well as offer a simple migration path for legacy customers. TBR notes that over 10% of Aiven’s customers are provisioning different services to multiple clouds and that many of Aiven’s adopters come knowing specifically which databases or monitoring tools they want to use and where they want to deploy them. While many customers often start with a preferred cloud partner, they ultimately seek to expand to other platforms for greater development autonomy and to avoid vendor lock-in. As a result, TBR believes Aiven’s role as an orchestrator for multiple database services across clouds positions the company uniquely in the market, as Aiven provides customers the degree of neutrality and third-party support required to navigate and manage various dispersed open-source projects.

However, as Aiven offers nine core services — including the widely deployed open-source platform tools Apache Kafka, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Cassandra, Redis, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, M3 and Grafana — there is a large degree of coopetition as Aiven’s partners offer related services on their clouds and, in some cases, the clouds of other CSPs. The increasingly open, hybrid multicloud approaches of vendors like Google Cloud and even IBM (NYSE: IBM) will prove competitive, yet TBR believes Aiven still challenges its partners when it comes to enabling open-source innovation and helping enterprises deliver this innovation at scale. Meanwhile, as customers increasingly look for a partner to avoid vendor lock-in, Aiven is well positioned to challenge many vendors that trail the market in providing a degree of vendor-agnosticism.  

Open-source technology has become less of a value differentiator and more of a foundational attribute that customers in the cloud database market have come to expect. Vendors in the space must now embed other feature sets and functionality to stand out and navigate the common challenges faced when it comes to modern app development and operational management in the cloud. However, customer expectations go beyond avoiding vendor lock-in, one of the known benefits of open-source technology, to include reducing TCO while improving time to market, security and reliability. Aiven is a managed cloud database services vendor that delivers a unified data platform for both traditional and cloud-native customers looking to deploy data architectures seamlessly and across multiple clouds. By capitalizing on managed cloud services, Aiven has created a way for customers to build, deploy and manage various open-source database management and analytics tools in a self-service manner. With a variety of deployment methods available to customers in conjunction with the benefits of automated security, scalability and resilience, Aiven has demonstrated this value proposition by building a customer base that crosses multiple industries and highlights both customer-facing and back-office analytics use cases.