Isima emerged from stealth this week to introduce a new hyper-converged data platform for the enterprise market.  Their vision is to create a data-driven enterprise for API, BI and AI use cases, by providing IT teams with a data solution beyond ESB, ETL, EDW, and BI.  The founding team has lofty goals and brings decades of expertise in scale-out relational databases, high-performance storage, and Applied AI for a wide variety of industries. 

To learn more about the company and the product, VMblog caught up with co-founder and CEO, Darshan Rawal.

VMblog: To kick things off, Isima has emerged from stealth and launched a product.  Could you tell us more about the vision behind the product?

Darshan Rawal:  We announced the general availability of bi(OS) this week, and through its launch, are defining a new category of data management - Hyper-Converged Data Management. We listened to the market and spent judicious energy on building a unique product to solve challenges facing IT teams. 

The traditional approach to data management had used any combination of ETL, queues, databases, data warehouses, and BI. Over the last decade, the limits to the types and volumes of data that could be handled has improved. Although, depending on the number of sources and the required processing (usually batch), the journey from ingestion to insight would take hours and perhaps days.

Rather than optimizing a particular stage as data moves along the long and windy road from ingestion to insight, bi(OS) takes a radically different approach and consolidates all the multiple stages into one platform. In doing so, it achieves dramatic improvements not only in the time it takes from ingestion to insight but also in the time it takes to go into production.  For the first time, enterprises can develop and deliver data-driven impact at the same velocity as modern digital disruptors without the need to hire integration experts.

VMblog:  Who is the target audience and user for bi(OS)?

Rawal:  bi(OS) has been validated at tier-1 enterprises in eCommerce, Telco, Fintech and Finance.  Any data practitioner - scientist, analyst, engineer, or product owner within enterprises of all sizes- is our target audience. With bi(OS), users can pick their hardest data problem and with one junior Python developer, can go into production in weeks.

VMblog:  What are some use case examples of the new product being launched today?

Rawal:  bi(OS) takes a radically different approach and consolidates all multiple stages of data management into one platform.  Builders of API, AI and BI use cases are served in a unified way.  This results in dramatic improvements not only in the time it takes from data ingestion to insight but also in the time it takes to go into production. It is equally versatile running ad-hoc queries as it is experimenting with AI/ML models and running these models in production -- all on the same unified platform in real-time. bi(OS) has been validated to improve outcomes for use cases such as a real-time supply chain, customer churn, fraud detection and trade reconciliation. 

VMblog:  How did the previous generation of data platforms influence Isima?

Rawal:  Much of the data offerings in the past decade were based on projects that were built for the largest tech providers such as Facebook, Yahoo, and LinkedIn.  These technology stalwarts had an infinite checkbook mindset to subsidize technology innovation by ads, commerce or content. This economic structure doesn't exist for enterprises which is why data-driven impact within IT takes multiple quarters or years. It's not a surprise then that deployment of cloud data lakes can take upwards of six months to a year, without any guarantee of an outcome. 

With these challenges in mind, Isima developed a data platform with ease of use and outcomes as its north star. This allowed bi(OS) to look at the entire lifecycle of data management, including ingestion, storage, processing, visualization, and utilization. This is why, a single engineer who has only two years of experience, can deliver data-driven impact in weeks.

VMblog:  What can we expect from Isima in the coming months?

Rawal:  The current situation with COVID-19 heightens the urgency for enterprises to do more with less.  bi(OS), built upon the foundation of outcomes first with less resources, was precision-crafted for this environment. In the coming months we should not expect enterprises to hire armies of engineers to solve their most pressing problems. We at Isima feel that our mission is very relevant today.  We are 10x better with data compared to any other solution, and our goal is to be 100x better.

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