DiffusionData is a company that is known as a pioneer in real-time data streaming and messaging solutions. Created to solve the real-time systems and application connectivity and data distribution challenges experienced by companies worldwide, the company received a £1 million investment from the North East Development Capital Fund (NEDCF) last month. To learn more about the company, Pulse 2.0 interviewed DiffusionData CEO Grethe Brown.
Grethe Brown’s Background
In Brown’s most recent role, Brown was a chief operating officer in the fintech industry before being headhunted to join Push Technology. And after running operations alongside the Chairman of the Board for a period, Brown was asked to take up the post of CEO.
“On joining the company, I canvassed opinions on a wide range of things and one of the messages that filtered through was that Push Technology as a name and the website wasn’t working for us. These are big issues and brave things to change, but we conducted a strategy workshop and just went with the findings,” said Brown. “We are now called DiffusionData. There wasn’t one person who was against the realignment because it was needed. Our product is called Diffusion – it just makes sense. It creates an alignment between what the business is, the product, and what we do. We are proud of our new brand and website.”
Brown told me that the company is exciting and the people who work there are excited about the product. The sales team and support staff speak of the product with pride. “Trust me when I say I’ve had very different experiences in this regard in the past. They’re clever and an amazing bunch of people, so I’m delighted to be here,” Brown added.
The Idea Behind DiffusionData
Brown noted that the company started out in eGaming back in 2006 when people were just starting to dabble with in-play. And Brown believed there was a massive opportunity nobody had addressed around data delivery. The main issue the industry faced at the time was that networks were poor and unreliable.
“We looked at all the technologies in the market and discovered they were not able to solve the delivery challenge. Traditional messaging products seemed the wrong approach. These solutions are like a postman – you hope they will always deliver your message but there are no guarantees,” Brown reflected. “We actually got inspiration from television operation – the very first frame you get is every pixel, then the next frame isn’t every pixel it’s just the delta because that’s a way more efficient way of delivering video – just send the changes rather than send everything every time. The trouble with messaging was that it was sending all the data all of the time.”
Brown told me that if the company thought they take the TV approach for the delivery mechanism, they can reduce the number of bytes that are moving – resulting in the company delivering 90% less data than everybody else.
This transformed the whole gaming market and some of the company’s customers were growing by 5% every week. So instead of offering 20 in-pay betting opportunities, they could offer 150 which was way more than other companies. This approach was unique to DiffusionData and at the same time, it was driving down costs. Put simply, DiffusionData had developed a transformative platform that enabled customers to offer way more betting markets than anyone else because of the efficiency of our platform.
Core Products
DiffusionData offers real-time, data streaming and messaging solutions. The company’s flagship offering is the Diffusion Data Platform, which consumes raw data in any size, format, or velocity; enriches the data in-flight; and distributes the data in real-time – reliably and at massive scale with secure, fine-grained, role-based access control.
Plus Diffusion provides low-code features that enable faster time-to-market. It is purpose-built to simplify and speed data-driven, real-time application development, reduce operational costs, and economically deliver hyper-personalized data at an Internet scale. Over the past 17 years, DiffusionData acted as a strategic partner with the platform serving companies worldwide and across industries.
DiffusionData’s real-time event broker with intelligent queuing and patented delta-streaming protocol saves companies 90% in bandwidth costs. And DiffusionData solves the data challenges faced by many companies and significantly reduces the development effort for event-driven applications with low-code features, simple-to-use WebSocket-based SDKs, and a wide variety of APIs. The platform components include:
1.) Data Gateway, with pre-built adapters, makes it easy to consume raw event data from a variety of sources in any size, format, or velocity.
2.) Data Wrangling, with hierarchical topic trees and low-code features, enables dynamic enrichment and transformation of data to suit the client applications and business logic.
3.) Data Distribution, with a real-time event broker, enables reliable and efficient data delivery to millions of concurrent connections.
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
DiffusionData’s technology has been constantly evolving. And to serve a market well, the company requires engagement with the market constituents to understand the details of their needs, challenges, and growth opportunities.
DiffusionData developed its market expertise via continual direct engagement with the business and technical teams in markets such as financial services. And the company’s technology has evolved in lockstep with the market’s technical and business requirements.
The company has built professional services and support teams that assist companies worldwide with their development, testing, and deployment to support market growth, as well as expansion into new markets.
“As a successful solutions provider, we understand where both the business and technical opportunities, and the landmines, lie for our clients,” Brown added.
Customer Success Story
In the past 17 years, DiffusionData acted as a strategic partner with their platform serving companies worldwide and across industries. And in the Gaming sector for example, DiffusionData’s customers include Caesars (one of the big 5 gaming companies currently listed on the S&P 500), William Hill, Microgaming, Sportingbet, Oddschecker, Betsson and others.
Serving the blue chip customer base, DiffusionData powers over $15 billion bets per year. And this gives the company a unique and experienced view into how to solve the event-data processing challenges that sports betting and gaming organizations face.
DiffusionData also has customers in other markets, most notably financial services. And DiffusionData accelerates banking technology initiatives by assuring scalable delivery of data around the globe in milliseconds and is deployed in minutes which speeds operational setup.
In the financial sector, Brown noted that when German digital retail bank, Consorsbank (a BNP Paribas-owned subsidiary) needed to enable its current account customers to trade and bank in real-time via a single mobile application they chose the Diffusion Data Platform. And Consorsbank wanted to create the next-generation consumer retail banking mobile application and provide a rich and engaging user experience for their customers. Where most retail bank applications give customers the ability to check account balances, transfer balances and make payments, Consorsbank wanted its application to go further. And they wanted to provide customers with the ability to:
— Create a custom ticker of stocks and shares and enter personal trades.
— Assign outgoing payments into categories, for example Car Fuel, Personal Gym Membership, Mobile Phone Monthly Contract. Their application was to be architected to learn which suppliers provide what services and automatically assign payments to categories as they go out.
— Produce informative graphs and charts of expenditures, broken down into the assigned categories for ease of recognition and tracking of expenses. For example, 22% of payments this month were for clothes.
— Receive alerts on unexpected transactions. For example, the largest transaction in an average month is €2,000, but this one was for €10,000.
— Receive account information and alerts to all devices including an Apple Watch.
The digital bank wanted their mobile application to be the central point for managing all of a customer’s accounts, engaging and tracking activity. While building the new application, Consorsbank came to the realization that a traditional Request/Response API style of interaction with back-end systems would not scale either for the anticipated number of users on the system or for the additional functionality planned. Essentially Consorsbank required an intelligent data platform that would isolate the bank’s existing back-end systems from the load generated by tens of thousands of mobile clients. Lastly, Consorsbank wanted to simplify and speed application development as well as improve performance. And its existing application used different APIs for each of the back-end systems with which it interacted causing poor application performance.
Consorsbank knew about Diffusion through another BNP Paribas subsidiary called DAB bank. And Consorsbank’s sister bank successfully addressed their application event-data challenges with DiffusionData. As part of an evaluation, Consorsbank performed a side-by-side comparison of two versions of its application – one using the DiffusionData platform and the other using traditional Request/Response messaging. DiffusionData won the comparison test by delivering a superior user experience, increased performance, faster response times, and reduced network payload due to the DiffusionData’s platform’s state-of-the-art data optimization and communication technology.
Using Diffusion, Consorsbank quickly developed a high-performance and event-driven mobile banking application. And DiffusionData delivered a new application experience to their customers that reacts in real-time to business events using a simple consistent API that spans all customer devices.
“The result is business growth and satisfied customers. An important ongoing benefit of Diffusion is that whenever Consorsbank adds, modifies, or replaces a back-end system, the (company’s technology) minimizes the impact of changes on the customer banking application, speeding support of new functionality and devices. Today, Consorsbank uses DiffusionData for its world-class mobile banking and trading application which runs seamlessly on the full range of mobile devices,” Brown observed.
Funding
As mentioned earlier, DiffusionData most recently received a £1 million investment from the North East Development Capital Fund (NEDCF), which was supported by the European Regional Development Fund and managed by Maven Capital Partners. Maven had initially invested in the company back in 2020 when the business operated as Push Technology. Maven led a £10 million investment and the business continued to grow following a further £2.55 million investment in May 2022 co-led by Maven and now receiving further backing via the NEDCF to support their expanded operations into the North East region.
Total Addressable Market
When I asked about the total addressable market that DiffusionData is addressing, Brown noted that the estimated value of Cloud Services in 2025 is predicted to be $1.301 trillion. And third parties who take and feed applications are effectively exchanging data via messaging systems like DiffusionData. With over 25% of all data being ‘Data in Motion,’ a large portion of the estimate would be targeted at platforms that deliver real-time data – an addressable market of $300 billion.
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates DiffusionData from the competition? “DiffusionData’s real-time event broker with intelligent queuing and patented delta-streaming protocol saves eGaming companies 90% in bandwidth costs – which is unique to them and sets us apart from the competition,” Brown replied. “Platform-proprietary delta streaming sends only the most recently updated data to millions of consumers in real-time while reducing bandwidth and latency. The intelligence at the heart of the platform makes it easy to transform and enrich multiple data sources on-the-fly to provide custom feeds to clients.”
Future Company Goals
Brown acknowledged that the latest investment from NEDCF and expansion into the North East region comes at a very exciting time for the company.
“Our key customers are expanding their use of the DiffusionData platform, new customers are rapidly coming on-board and we are getting noticed. This added confidence in DiffusionData will assist us in establishing an extended quality and performance team based in the North East; another significant step in supporting our footprint growth,” Brown concluded. “The customers we have are using us more and more. Our annual recurring revenue increases with the current customer base and we already have a large number on the books. They like what they see as we support their growth and as they grow, we grow. Our aim is to double annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2023.”
