Streaming data lake supplier Hydrolix has reported a 12x increase in customer growth over the last 12 months as it widens its integration with other platforms and takes advantage of its relationship with content delivery network Akamai.
At the IT Press Tour of Boston and Massachusetts, Blocks & Files heard that worldwide customer numbers for the Portland, Oregon, company had reached 287, with 59 of them now in the EMEA region.
The company boasted of large worldwide brands using its Hydrolix product to squeeze their customer and operational data, with users across the media, consumer packaged goods, gaming, finance, automotive, sportswear, and security segments, among others.
The idea is that Hydrolix offers all the properties of a traditional data lake, including a flexible schema, raw storage, decoupled storage, and independently scalable query and ingest compute.
Use cases include platform and network observability, compliance, SIEM, real user monitoring, ML/AI anomaly detection, and bot, piracy, and fraudulent user detection, the company says. The data lake can be deployed on Akamai’s LKE, Google GKE, Amazon EKS, and Azure AKS, and stored in S3-compatible object stores.
Hydrolix’s data ecosystem includes connectors to leading data platforms like Splunk, Spark, and Kibana (ELK), and works complementarily with Big Query and Snowflake.
The solution is sold direct and through partners like Akamai, which white label the technology. For instance, on the IT Press Tour, we heard from executives from both Akamai and Boston-headquartered sports shoe and apparel manufacturer New Balance as to how Hydrolix’s tech was effectively used.
New Balance uses the Akamai content delivery network to distribute content and collect analytics on its effectiveness, then stores that data in the Hydrolix streaming data lake.
This use case supports the Akamai Connected Cloud, a massively distributed edge and cloud platform that brings together core cloud computing and edge computing, along with security and content delivery.
TrafficPeak is the observability product built on the Akamai Connected Cloud – a white-labeled Hydrolix streaming data lake that enables users to ingest, monitor, query, store, and analyze massive amounts of data in real time, at “75 percent less cost than other providers,” claim the partners.
The Akamai connections run deep. Marty Kagan, CEO and co-founder of Hydrolix, used to be Boston-headquartered Akamai’s director of technology, international, based in Paris. Other Hydrolix executives also used to work for the CDN provider.
Maybe it’s not surprising, therefore, that Akamai has made a minority investment in Hydrolix. The company has so far raised $65 million in total funding, including a B round for $35 million completed this May.
Asked whether the firm was profitable yet, Kagan said: “We’re not profitable so far, we have a long runway. We expect to employ 140 by the end of the year, and are hiring staff in Singapore, India and Japan, for instance.”
He added: “We didn’t develop Hydrolix just for the CDN market, but it’s ideal in terms of penetrating the overall data lake market. Akamai are a revenue generator. Before they came along we were mainly dealing with terabytes, not petabytes – they are selling our solution to the world’s 10,000 biggest companies.”
Hydrolix charges for its data streaming lake per gigabyte of ingested data.
