Some time ago, a mentor of mine advised me to listen more than I spoke. He told me the secrets to building a successful company:  listen to your customers to understand the true value of what your company offers. Listen to your employees to understand what is necessary to create the best product, and empower them to get about the business of building. And listen to the market to learn where your product can have the most impact.

As I embark on this new adventure – taking on the responsibility of being the CEO of Volt Active Data – I’m doing a lot of listening, and I’ve heard much that stays with me. The market has told us that our fast, in-memory, scalable database has unique value in defined markets, and is honed to solve the toughest problems in the most demanding environments. Our customers explain our value best, our employees have told us what they need to increase our momentum, and the market is telling us we have momentum.

I see the evidence in our customer list: global telcos, telecom ISVs and CSPs are some of our largest adopters. These companies place huge confidence in technology, making five-to-ten year investments in the software infrastructure necessary to underpin the daily communications needs of people, businesses, and industries.

The telecoms industry is about so much more than fat pipes and smartphones and dial tones: it is about the future. The Internet of Things could not exist without telco. Modern banking and trading could not exist. On-line games, mobile advertising, shopping on your favorite website: none of this could exist. It does today because these companies understood the need and the opportunity, and created the systems. Volt Active Data has been built into these systems that take advantage of underlying cost effective expansive deployment capabilities, such as cloud and virtualization, and providing the ability to modernize existing high value mission critical applications to address the market evolving dynamics driven by 5G, NFV & SDN. We are extremely proud of this, and very impatient to announce our latest telco win. But more about that later.

Talking to our customers over the past six months, I have heard that Volt Active Data also solves the needs of many of the industries powered by underlying telcos: advertising technology, where publishers and advertisers must find each other, and their best prospects, in less than 200 milliseconds or lose a sale; financial services, where the time to decide if a credit card swipe is legitimate or a fraudulent transaction is less than 50 milliseconds; on-line gaming, where players become frustrated or bored in a heartbeat, requiring game creators to react in milliseconds to tailor the game to ensure engagement; and of course IoT, where machines communicate with machines in fragments of a second too small for humans to register.

I see the opportunities. I hear the stories our customers share. And with the Volt Active Data team, I am moving to meet the challenges. We have invested in sales and solution architects to align with the markets where we have demonstrable value. We have invested in marketing to align our messaging to a defined audience and expand our messages to more adjacent industries, such as IoT. We have also opened a new office in Europe to meet increasing demand in international markets, and we are increasing our investment in our engineering team so we can further expose the full value of our truly enterprise/telco grade product: Volt Active Data.

Volt Active Data offers organizations the ability to develop new applications, and modernize legacy applications, that take advantage of the biggest trends in business today: cloud, virtualization, real-time. We are also reinforcing our core values: always correct, predictable low latencies, ACID compliance, SQL, and rational licensing and operating costs.  All this with lower TCO and the ability to support the relentless and significant increase in data volumes all companies know is their future.

We are building more than a great company: we are building a legacy, based on the vision of our co-founder Dr. Michael Stonebraker and his research team. We are building a system you can count on, all the time, to support your enterprise applications. We are building the future, with you.

I look forward to this next phase in Volt Active Data’s evolution, and invite you join us in the journey, as customers, through our blog, or as employees. We have our eye on the future, and we have got your back in the now.