Crate.io is the developer of CrateDB, a global leading-edge IoT database. Designed specifically to support machine data applications and IIoT, CrateDB is optimized for time series and industrial data and runs in the cloud on Azure and AWS as well as on the edge and on-premise. Crate.io was founded in June 2013 and has offices in the USA, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Easy Engineering: What are the main areas of activity of the company?
CRATE: Crate provides a distributed, scalable SQL database for use-cases in the machine data world. So far, we’ve had cooperations with many companies from different industrial segments such as packaging, consumer goods security and energy, as CrateDB is used to store and query machine data at scale. This is because our database makes it easy and economical to handle the speed, volume, and diversity of machine and log data. In fact, our customers have reported CrateDB ingesting millions of data points per second, while also querying terabytes of data in real-time with previously unachievable cost savings.
E.E: What’s the news for 2021 about new products?
CRATE: For 2021 our expectation is that we will have even more balance and tight coexistence between cloud and edge. We saw the importance of cloud services and the rise of services on the edge last year more than ever before. Accordingly, we have adapted our own product portfolio and are also seeing these developments amongst our partners Microsoft and AWS. In addition, we constantly expand our SQL functionality to further enable use-cases combining relational requirements with time-series data and massive scale.
E.E: What are the ranges of traded products?
CRATE: CrateDB is an industrial-grade database that comes in three versions: in the cloud, on the edge and on-premises. We are here to extend the limits of traditional time-series databases and with this setup, we can cover preferences and requirements.
E.E: At what stage is the market where you are currently active?
CRATE: Many industrial companies are in their early stage of transformation into digital players. A recent study from our partner Microsoft from October 2020 shows that manufacturing companies are rapidly adopting IoT – 93% of those surveyed by Microsoft indicate they have adopted IoT-technology and 78% have at least one project that reached the “use” stage – for example in production flow monitoring, industrial automation, and production planning and scheduling. All these companies are in the middle of the fourth industrial revolution and we are right in the middle of it to accelerate the necessary digitization of the industry even further.
E.E: What makes you and your product so unique in the market?
CRATE: CrateDB is an industrial-grade database extending the limits of traditional time-series databases. It’s fully distributed, the unique architecture combines the simplicity of SQL with the benefits of NoSQL at scale. When talking about industrial IoT data, one must handle a huge amount of machine data and process them in real-time which most time-series databases can’t manage. Our database can scale at high volumes and varieties while running aggregated complex real-time queries, with high availability and speed anywhere. We have developed a highly scalable distributed database solution that combines the performance of NoSQL with the power and simplicity of standard SQL. Rather than trying to optimize transactional architectures, we optimize for efficiency, scale, and real-time thanks to our decision to focus on eventual consistency.