When they go low we go high — Michelle Obama
Wowsers! What a difference a year makes!!! When Ali and I founded Meroxa, our goal was simple: turn real-time data into the default input for how companies deliver customer value. Since launching last April, Meroxa has become the de-facto platform for creating real-time data pipelines for over 300 companies pushing billions of events through our infrastructure.
Our customers have used us to:
- Build privacy law-compliant real-time analytics dashboard based on geography
- Migrate petabytes of data from legacy, on-premise data warehouses to cloud-native solutions
- Transform legacy, proprietary data from sensors to report on aircraft health in real-time
- Update fraud detection models in real-time to more accurately prevent unauthorized transactions
- Using completed transactions to update a search index in real-time for an e-commerce platform
- Dynamic pricing and driver availability based on demand for an online grocer
- And much, much more…
While taking a deep dive into who’s actually using our product, we noticed software engineers were increasingly our biggest audience. To better serve their needs, we released a Terraform provider so they could programmatically build their pipelines, but if I’m being brutally honest, we knew that wasn’t enough to warrant their attention. This space is extremely crowded. There are 1700+ tools in the marketplace that help folks move data from one place to the next at various speeds and fidelity. Even with a plethora of point solutions in the “modern” data stack, engineers are spending more time dealing with the nuances of integration instead of delivering business value.
Alongside our research, we also started hearing increased chatter about the importance of data applications. Today’s manifestation of data apps mostly takes the shape of analytics dashboards. While useful, this still feels a bit underwhelming given the number of data-specific platforms and tools at an engineer’s disposal.
Fret no more engineers. We heard you loud and clear and I’d like to submit Meroxa’s data application framework, Turbine, for your approval. Turbine represents a big change for not only Meroxa the company (hence the 2.0) but for the industry as well. Most of the tools in the data space focus on low code dashboards to do replication and/or integration. Turbine is a code-first offering that empowers software engineers to use the tools and best practices they’ve been employing for years to solve problems at scale.
With Turbine being just code, there’s no need to have separate workflows for your app and your data infrastructure. Turbine is to data applications as Rails is to web application development. We provide an opinionated, yet flexible framework that allows engineers to create real-time data solutions in days not months. Want to test the output of a pipeline before deploying it to production? Write unit tests that can be executed locally on your machine. Want to understand the impact of changes to your data model on your existing infrastructure? Write integration tests. Turbine allows you to bring software engineering best practices to the data world without procuring yet another point solution.
At Meroxa, we understand the importance of easy access to data for our customers so they can in turn provide value to their customers. We’re excited to evolve the data app status quo beyond dashboard visualizations and give engineers the tools to build engaging innovative solutions. If you’re excited and want to learn more about how we put the app in data app, check out the Turbine: Putting the “App” in Data App blog post, docs, and examples to get started. We can’t wait to see what you build!
