Aerospike’s Aveekshith Bushan exits after a decade of building APJ business

Bushan helped build Aerospike’s APJ operation from a handful of customers and one employee into a regional business spanning India, ASEAN and Japan.

Aerospike’s vice president of sales for Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ), Aveekshith Bushan, is leaving the company after more than a decade, following a tenure during which he helped build the database company’s regional business from the ground up.

Bushan announced his departure in a LinkedIn post, saying his journey at Aerospike will come to an end after 10.5 years. He joined the company in 2015 after a stint at MongoDB, when Aerospike had only a handful of customers in APJ, revenue in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and a team of one.

Since then, Bushan has helped grow the regional operation into a sizeable business with a team of around 20 people across India, ASEAN and Japan.

APJ now accounts for close to 20 percent of Aerospike’s global ARR, according to Bushan.

The regional business has also expanded its customer base across financial services, telecom, transportation, stock exchanges, e-commerce, payments, gaming, brokerages, advertising technology and other digital businesses.

Bushan said Aerospike now works with some of the largest financial institutions in India and China, seven of the largest telcos across India and ASEAN, and railway organisations in India and Japan.

In India, he said Aerospike’s technology is now used across a wide range of consumer applications, with the company having built a presence across major digital businesses.

From one-person operation to regional business

Bushan joined Aerospike when the company was still establishing its presence in APJ and went on to hold several sales leadership roles, including Country Manager APAC, Regional Director Sales - APAC and, most recently, VP Sales – APJ.

His current role covered regional revenue strategy and execution, quota and pipeline management, sales forecasting, enterprise and strategic accounts, partner ecosystems and market expansion across countries.

He worked closely with product, marketing, alliances and customer success teams to align regional go-to-market priorities.

In his LinkedIn post, Bushan credited customers as the biggest driver of Aerospike’s regional growth, saying they helped take the technology into new organisations and markets even when the company had limited marketing resources.

He also highlighted the importance of building the business around local market understanding rather than simply replicating a go-to-market model from Aerospike’s US headquarters.

“Building a region far removed from the West Coast of the US is never easy,” Bushan said, adding that the APJ operation eventually looked like a different company compared with the rest of the business.

Partner ecosystem remains part of the growth story

Bushan’s role at Aerospike also extended beyond direct sales into building the regional partner ecosystem and supporting market-entry strategies.

His profile notes responsibility for leading regional expansion initiatives, partner ecosystems and market-entry programmes, alongside enterprise sales and strategic accounts.

That is particularly relevant for Aerospike as its database technology is used across industries where partners play a role in application development, cloud transformation, data infrastructure and enterprise technology deployments.

The company’s APJ growth has therefore been built not only around direct customer acquisition but also around expanding its regional ecosystem and establishing Aerospike in markets with different levels of technology maturity.

Bushan said he had worked across almost every customer-facing role a product company could offer during his time at Aerospike, an experience he described as important to his development as a leader.

What next for Bushan?

Bushan has not disclosed his next move.

He ended his departure announcement by saying he is moving on to his next opportunity and that an update will follow.

Before joining Aerospike, Bushan spent time at MongoDB as solution architecture director for APAC, where he worked across both direct and channel business. He has also been associated with the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore as a guest faculty member since 2015.

For Aerospike, Bushan’s departure marks the end of one of the longest leadership tenures behind the company’s APJ expansion. For the region, his exit comes after a decade in which the business moved from an early-stage operation with limited customers and resources to a sizeable regional contributor to Aerospike’s global recurring revenue.