Aveekshith Bushan takes charge of MariaDB APAC with partners and ISVs in focus

The new MariaDB APAC GM says he will work closely with the company’s partner network, invest in ISVs and build a focused regional organisation around enterprise data transformation.

Aveekshith Bushan has taken charge of MariaDB’s APAC business with a broader enterprise data mandate after more than a decade at Aerospike, where he worked with customers running some of the region’s most demanding real-time applications.

For Bushan, the new role is not a departure from the database industry but an opportunity to take his experience in real-time performance, scale and reliability into a wider enterprise database market.

His immediate priorities at MariaDB include understanding customers across APAC, working with the company’s partner ecosystem, investing in the ISV market and building a focused regional organisation.

“The honest answer is that I wasn't looking for a way out of Aerospike. I was looking for a new challenge,” Bushan said.

Bushan says MariaDB’s partner ecosystem will be an important part of his APAC strategy as he looks to expand the company’s enterprise footprint.

“I am excited about the strong partner network that MariaDB works with and the potential to accelerate growth leveraging this ecosystem,” he said.

He also identifies ISVs as another area where MariaDB can build significant opportunity.

“The ISV market is another space with a massive potential and that is a space we will invest in,” Bushan said.

The focus comes as enterprises reassess their database architectures across transactional workloads, analytics, cloud and AI. Bushan says customers are no longer asking only which database to deploy. They are looking at how to build architectures that can support different workloads while controlling infrastructure cost and complexity.

That broader requirement is one of the reasons he sees an opportunity for MariaDB.

Taking real-time database experience into a broader market

Bushan spent 10.5 years at Aerospike working with financial institutions, FinTech companies, telecom operators, travel and transportation businesses, payment companies, e-commerce companies, stock exchanges, brokerages, gaming businesses and other organisations where data sits at the centre of applications.

One of the biggest lessons from that experience, he says, is that database performance is not simply a technology metric.

Latency, scalability, availability and predictable performance can directly affect revenue, customer experience and business operations when applications depend on real-time data.

He now sees a broader database challenge emerging across enterprises.

“Organisations today aren't simply asking: ‘Which database should we use?’” Bushan said. “They are asking: ‘How do we build an architecture that can support transactional workloads, analytics, real-time applications and increasingly AI - while controlling cost and complexity?’”

That shift is central to his thinking about MariaDB.

The company has deep roots in open source and MySQL compatibility, but Bushan says its opportunity now extends beyond being viewed simply as an alternative database. He points to transactional workloads, enterprise databases, analytics, cloud and AI as areas where MariaDB can address a wider set of enterprise requirements.

He also points to MariaDB’s addition of GridGain, with its distributed in-memory and compute capabilities and SQL support, as another part of the technology opportunity.

For Bushan, the appeal is also commercial. He sees enterprises looking for alternatives to expensive proprietary database architectures and believes MariaDB can play a role in helping them modernise their environments while improving the economics of their technology stacks.

APAC presents a mix of modernisation and new-build opportunities

Bushan sees APAC as particularly attractive because the region combines large installed bases of traditional enterprise technology with a new generation of cloud-native businesses.

India, Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea and China each have different technology markets and customer requirements, but he says they share a broader challenge around extracting more value from data without allowing infrastructure complexity and cost to constrain growth.

That creates opportunities across both enterprise modernisation and newer digital businesses.

Bushan points to his recent experience at the Global Fintech Festival in Mumbai as an example of how deeply technology is now embedded in business and everyday life.

“I was at the Global Fintech Festival in Mumbai this week and if at all one wants proof on where technology is playing a fundamental role in transforming lives, this event provided just that,” he said.

The regional opportunity, however, will require a differentiated approach across markets rather than a single APAC playbook.

A FinTech in India can have very different requirements from a telecom operator in Indonesia or a large enterprise in Korea, Bushan says, but the underlying question increasingly remains the same: how to extract more value from data without allowing infrastructure complexity and cost to become a constraint on growth.

Building the APAC organisation

Bushan says his immediate approach at MariaDB will be to listen and learn before setting the longer-term agenda.

He plans to spend time with customers to understand the problems they are solving, where MariaDB is winning, where it needs to improve and where the biggest opportunities exist, particularly in use cases where MariaDB and GridGain can address customer requirements.

He also plans to spend significant time with the regional team.

Bushan attributes much of Aerospike’s success to a strong team that worked together and supported each other, and says he wants to carry that approach into his new role.

“My goal is to build on the strengths that already exist within MariaDB while creating a focused, high-performance APAC organisation,” he said.

Enterprise transformation will be another part of that mandate, with Bushan calling on the wider technology community to participate in MariaDB’s next phase of growth.

“There will be several openings in the region and we would like to get the best talent to come join us in this journey,” he said.

For Bushan, the move therefore builds on rather than breaks from his previous decade in databases.

Aerospike gave him experience with applications where real-time performance, scale and reliability are critical. MariaDB gives him a broader enterprise database landscape across which to apply that experience.

“I’m not leaving the database industry. I’m going deeper into it,” Bushan said.