Aerospike names Don Dama as Chief Executive Officer

Aerospike has appointed Don Dama as Chief Executive Officer, marking what it describes as its next phase of growth in operational AI.

Dama brings more than 25 years of enterprise technology experience, with senior roles at SingleStore, Mirantis, Oracle, Infor and i2 Technologies. His appointment comes as about half of Aerospike's revenue last year came from large-scale operational AI and machine learning work.

The database company is positioning itself around rising demand for systems that support AI applications using live operational data rather than static information. It argues that businesses moving AI into day-to-day operations need data infrastructure that can respond at scale in milliseconds.

In comments issued alongside the appointment, Dama outlined that view of the market.

"A model may reason brilliantly. Compute may run quickly. And applications and agents can execute. But none of it operates correctly unless it is continuously grounded in the changing reality of the enterprise it serves," said Don Dama, Chief Executive Officer of Aerospike.

"You need to operationalize intelligence against the continuously changing state of the enterprise. That's the infrastructure challenge of the AI era. And it's not only the opportunity that Aerospike was built to address, but also what it's delivered for years in some of the world's most demanding applications and most successful AI and ML initiatives," Dama said.

AI focus

More than 2 billion people interact with applications built on Aerospike's platform, according to the company. It pointed to customer deployments including PayPal's real-time fraud prevention system and AMD's grid computing monitoring platform as evidence of the scale at which its technology is already used.

PayPal's fraud platform executes more than 8 million database transactions per second, with roughly 75% of risk decisions completed in under 50 milliseconds, according to Aerospike. AMD's platform runs more than 20 million jobs a day, with more than 1 million operating concurrently at peak, it added.

AppsFlyer's mobile attribution platform handles 2.5 million writes and 4.5 million reads a second, according to the company. Aerospike said those workloads are processed with sub-millisecond latency across global operations.

The figures highlight how software suppliers are linking their growth prospects to the practical use of AI in operational settings rather than experimental projects. For infrastructure companies, that means arguing that AI systems need constant access to current business data to support decisions in areas such as payments, fraud, advertising and large-scale computing.

Leadership change

Dama's background spans chief executive, sales and general management roles across data, cloud and enterprise application businesses. Aerospike said that experience was a factor in choosing a new leader as the market for AI infrastructure shifts from experimentation to production deployment.

Tim Connor, Chairman of the Aerospike Board and Partner at NewView Capital, said the appointment comes at a pivotal moment for the business.

"Aerospike is in an exciting phase with accelerating growth and is well positioned to become a foundational data platform for operational AI," said Tim Connor, Chairman of the Aerospike Board and Partner at NewView Capital.

"Throughout his career, Don has helped enterprise technology companies capitalize on market transitions and scale rapidly. He brings the ideal combination of urgency, product vision, execution discipline, and leadership to build on Aerospike's momentum and capture the opportunity ahead. I'm excited to welcome him to the Aerospike team," Connor said.

Aerospike has customers across sectors including financial services, telecoms, adtech and AI. Alongside AMD and PayPal, it also named Mistral AI among organisations using its software to retrieve and update operational data in real time.

The leadership change puts Dama in charge at a time when many technology vendors are trying to define their role in the next stage of AI adoption. Aerospike's case is that value will lie not just in models and computing power, but in the databases and data systems that keep those tools aligned with changing business conditions.

About half of Aerospike's revenue last year came from large-scale operational AI and machine learning use cases.