ATERYX was not born in a vacuum.
The origin story of ATERYX is based on experiences and lessons learnt while I was a Principal Architect at the largest datacenter company in the world, Equinix.
My job was to address interfacing issues with a very large, Fortune 500 hyper-scaler customer.
The first step, as always, is to really understand the problem: assumptions need to be validated, operating methodologies understood and view the current communication solution thru the eyes of the customer.
This took considerable time, talking to Equinix SMEs, creating models of operation and understanding how the hyper-scaler customer operated within this model. In some ways I became the customer advocate, looking for deficiencies and friction, despite being an employee of the vendor.
What I found was that most of the issues experienced were predominantly issues of scale going beyond the available bandwidth of the communicating medium and subsequently overloading customer and vendor operators within this medium.
Also, the hyper-scaler customer worked with many different datacenter vendors, across many time zones, with vendor specific terminology for the same class of services. Despite the millions of dollars of services bought, most operations used email as the primary communication channel for initiation and control.
Interestingly, interfacing thru RESTful APIs with a single vendor would require significant resources given the solution complexity requirements, interfacing to 3 or more vendors would be a Herculean task, even for this very successful software orientated hyper-scaler company. Despite any successful RESTful API integration, that would only solve half of the problem. Many of the orders initiated required asynchronous updates and communication to and from the customer for order completion. Doing so with a combination of RESTful API, using email for updates and OOB communication would only provide a piece meal solution. Consequently, this hyper-scaler (and many others) resort to email as their common denominator communication model, for controlling, maintaining and scaling their multi-hundred-million-dollar installations.
It must be stated, despite its common usage, email as a means for commerce is inefficient, confusing and painfully error prone, but it does have some advantages: it is asynchronous in nature, a common denominator and has traceability.
Email was designed for humans to communicate to other humans. For automation, email is a nightmare, despite any AI, filtering, mapping, or any other tool thrown at it, it is fundamentally not designed to be used as an automation medium.
To address issues listed above and more, a new messaging communication medium was needed to remove the disadvantages of email but keep and improve on its advantages.
Enter EMG
What followed next was astounding.
This new communication medium enabled simpler, more flexible, zero error, zero downtime and responsive communication between customer and vendor.
The efficiency gains were equally impressive, from the original communication model to replacement by EMG, a 15,000% gain in responsiveness was achieved on initial introduction, subsequent versions improved upon this. That is not a typo!
Integration was simpler, intuitive, exceptionally secure, resilient and amazingly responsive. The asynchronous capabilities of the new communication platform enabled a richer vendor service model for consumption in an automated means by the customer.
Email was no longer the primary communication model.
The increase in customer satisfaction from the hyper-scaler was also spectacular. Friction free communication can now be the reality of the customer/vendor relationship.
Despite EMG’s strengths it had a major weakness, it was proprietary.
Thus, ATERYX was born.
Leaning on the principles and lesson of EMG, ATERYX’s mission is to provide customers an asynchronous communication platform for friction free, resilient and powerful interfacing to effortlessly scale with the requirements of both customer and vendor at the speed of commerce.
This platform enables vendors to bring to market richer service models, higher customer satisfaction and frictionless customer/vendor relationships.
With ATERYX, a new dimension of customer/vendor integration is to begin.
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