“There’s a better way to do it — find it.” – Thomas Edison
We're excited to introduce Kurrent, the new brand identity of Event Store. Kurrent — previously known as Event Store, the creator of the open source project Event Store Database (ESDB), the first event-native data platform — more accurately describes the vision and mission of the company. With nearly 150 customers and more than 50 million downloads of ESDB, we look forward to continuing our drive to wow our customers and prospective customers with a future of new product offerings, support capabilities and education experiences.
Kurrent’s vision is to create context with data by taking the world's events and giving them meaning. Marc Andreesen famously proclaimed in 2011 “Software is eating the world.” We’re in an era of digital transformation where software companies continue to increase their influence and drive value, and we believe the next phase will be an era where this explosion of data creation will enrich the world in ways we cannot yet imagine.
We all have experienced the value of data to drive outcomes, yet what we are really after are journeys, stories and insights. These historically elusive insights are dependent upon the world’s data having not only relevant content, but a rich context. Meaning or insight is not created in isolation, so it follows that contextualization of the data journey from its origin through its lifecycle is what enriches the insights we depend on and which will shape our future. There is no greater evidence of this than what we're experiencing with early artificial intelligence use cases exploding onto the scene. Kurrent is at the beginning, middle and end of this journey for context, for meaning.
The harnessing of electricity may have changed the course of how we live and conduct business more than any other invention. Our ability to create power for personal and business needs has opened unlimited opportunities. There are two foundational elements to this source of energy. First is the creation of electric power. Second, and as important, is the ability to move or distribute this critical resource to homes and businesses initially and now into areas never originally imagined like transportation, communication, data centers, self-driving cars and many many other applications touching literally everything we do and how we live. It is not an overstatement to say that the generation and distribution of electricity has literally changed the world and continues to do so.
Kurrent is at the heart of a similar renaissance. This is why we picked Kurrent as our name. Today it is simple to see data as the new electricity. Data is at the center, powering everything we all do, all day, everyday. Like electrical generation we must put front and center not just how all this data is created, but how data is distributed.
Historically, data had been created in an application development environment in an operational database, and for decades — and in many cases today — it is still just stored. Over the past 25 years, and as the internet gained tremendous momentum, our requirements for this precious resource exploded from data originated in operational databases mostly used for business reporting to a dramatic set of products and services delivered on demand to consumers and businesses by enterprise software companies and hyperscalers.
Our need for data origination continues to grow at unprecedented rates. In 2012 we created 2 zettabytes of data and in 2024 we will create 120 zettabytes; that’s almost 6,000% growth in just over a decade. Like electricity, it is one thing to create data, but what makes it valuable is to move it into downstream applications and systems for expanded uses.
Since the advent of the operational database we have radically transformed how we create, move and use data. From data creation at origin, which ramped quickly in the 1970s, we have developed ways to transform data for a large variety of new applications: read models for data analysis, feeding into data mining products, further converted into data warehousing platforms, uploaded into big data solutions and now transformed and reshaped again into data lakes and other cloud based storage systems for data analytics use cases that range in the many thousands, if not millions! With the emergence of AI we anticipate a multiplication of uses that are just being imagined and the resulting demands put on the creation, distribution, transformation and curation of data are unlimited.
In 2011 a distribution technology called Kafka came on the scene with the idea to move data. Kafka’s success is evident and shows that static data lacks utility, but data in motion, combined with other data elements and done in the arena of timely business requirements, has made businesses more responsive to their markets and customers. Kafka was developed with the same atomic element of Kurrent’s product; the event.
An event is an immutable fact that has happened. Events in isolation are simply bits of data, but in combination with data from applications and systems is where and how the story gets told. Therefore, we can understand how a fact without context has marginal value, but a collection of these facts or events in context has the potential to tell a rich story. A simple example is when you buy something online you can check the order and receive status on the shipment. It takes an order system and a shipment system coming together to tell the complete story of your order. Kurrent’s mission is to turn events into insights by allowing this rich context from the origin of all data.
Modern streaming has created many opportunities to distribute data to the many points of need, whether they be other applications, other services, analytic workloads or AI models. While this adds a great deal of flexibility, this movement also adds new pressure points. Imaging you turned the lights in your home on and you had to wait for the current to reach your home? Or to reach a particular appliance? Unacceptable!
The same is true in our new world of the “Real Time Enterprise.” We’re all dependent on data being at our fingertips so that decisions can be made to book an airline reservation, book a car, check our account balances and communicate with our loved ones — not to mention getting a notification that our flight was canceled, our credit card was compromised, or a company was breached with the potential for customer data loss unless we acted immediately. Like electricity data must be ubiquitous, easily accessible and timely… meaning now!
Kurrent has built a modern data platform that allows companies to originate data, aggregate data from other sources, curate it, maintain its integrity in an immutable, globally ordered log. Then, like electrical distribution systems, it can stream the data specifically to the exact point of need enabling companies to serve their customers in very granular ways, delivering specific data by topic, by customer, by group of products or whatever granular designation is defined by the company with high context and in real time.
We are excited for this new stage of Event Store evolving to Kurrent, beginning today and continuing over the coming months. We look forward to serving the new demands of business and consumer applications by creating rich context with the data in our world. Our contention is that it is a modern imperative that data be as available and ubiquitous as electricity.
Come take this journey with us as we put data Context in Action™.