Overheard at Real-Time Analytics Summit 2025

This year’s Real-Time Analytics Summit, held on 14 May 2025, was a free, online event that drew over 5,500 registrants from around the world. The switch to a virtual event reflected the need to serve the global community of interest in real-time analytics. Users who registered could attend live online, or watch on-demand as their schedules permitted.

In fact, if you didn’t register already, you can watch all the sessions on-demand by going to rtasummit.com, and register now. And yes, we also provide the slide decks!

For now, let’s take a glimpse at the highlights of what happened over the course of the day.

Keynotes from StarTree and Uber

The event was hosted by StarTree CMO Jess Iandiorio, who introduced the two main keynote sessions of the day: StarTree’s co-founder and CEO, Kishore Gopalakrishna, as well as Uber’s Praveen Neppalli Naga, CTO for Mobility and Delivery.

Kishore highlighted the shift from traditional single-vendor monolithic stacks to flexible, disaggregated stacks comprised of modular specialized best-of-breed systems. This new architecture allows multiple use cases on a single data platform, breaking down silos and opening access to data across the enterprise. He also covered key new innovations occurring in StarTree Cloud. These include the further integration of AI with the StarTree platform via Model Context Protocol (MCP) and vector embedding support, as well as Bring Your Own Kubernetes (BYOK) capabilities to support cloud, hybrid cloud and on-premises deployment models.

These innovations allow StarTree Cloud to not only serve user-facing applications that can scale to global audiences of a hundred million or a billion or more users, but to the new frontier of agent-facing applications that rely on natural-language queries answered in coordination with Large Language Models (LLMs) that will require fast vector searches at orders of magnitude greater concurrency.

Uber CTO for Mobility and Delivery, Praveen Neppalli Naga

In his keynote Praveen discussed how Apache Pinot is powering the future of Uber’s Marketplace and Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Uber’s services have now evolved far beyond its core services, Uber Black and UberX, to encompass ridehailing, reserved, shared and airport services, as well as specialized services for teens, scooters, transit and outstation cabs for intercity transportation. Its UberEats delivery services have expanded from restaurants to encompass retailers, groceries and alcohol.

Uber now operates in 10,000 cities spread across 70 nations globally, serving 171 million monthly active consumers, all of whom are supported by 8 million earners that drive 33 million trips each day. All of this requires Uber to be a pioneer in real-time intelligence, all so that a driver and a passenger can reliably find each other at that exact right spot on the road at precisely the right time.

Looking to the future of mobility, Praveen discussed Uber’s plans to merge autonomous vehicles into its fleet to operate sustainable hybrid marketplaces. He also highlighted the many partnerships Uber has created to support this vision. Praveen noted that, ultimately, the needs of each market and the rider experience will determine the right balance going forward.

The Real-Time Revolutionary Awards

StarTree and Amazon Web Services (AWS) sponsored the inaugural Real-Time Revolutionaries Awards. These awards went to companies that are pioneers in adopting Apache Pinot and real-time analytics, changing their company, their industry, and the world at large. There was also one special award for the single greatest community contributor to the Apache Pinot open source software project. Award categories this year included the following:

• Velocity Award — for new use cases; fastest time-to-production
• Scaling to New Heights Award — achievements in growth/usage
• Payment Powerhouse — achievements in digital payment processing
• Community Champion Award — awarded to the individual who made the most significant Apache Pinot open source community contribution
• Market Maker Award — for fintech industry achievement
• Measuring Success Award — for best use case of real-time analytics to measure business impact
• Engagement Innovator Award — for best consumer engagement achievement
• O11y Award — for best observability use case
• Global Innovator Award — best non-US innovator reshaping industries
• Real-Time Impact Award — greatest change to business status quo; the equivalent of our “Best Picture” award

For now we’ll hold off on announcing the winners—we’ll blog about the honorees soon enough, providing details as to why each won in their respective categories. Thank you to AWS for co-sponsoring, and congratulations to all the winners!

Highlighted Sessions

You can go to the RTASummit.com website to read the entire program and to watch all the sessions on-demand. Here’s a roundup of some select sessions that really caught our attention:

• Life360: Inside Life360’s Family Safety and Real-Time Geospatial Analytics — Imagine your teen piles into the family car and you start driving home from Yosemite National Park. Then your teen sheepishly admits they left their backpack behind. Now imagine pulling out your phone and using a mobile app to locate the backpack’s exact location from a satellite in orbit. This is not science fiction. Discover how Life360 partnered with Hubble to watch over your family and their most cherished possessions.
• 7Signal: Managing Trade-Offs in System Design: A Case Study in Migrating from Flink to Pinot — 7Signal provides digital experience monitoring solutions, specializing in Wifi and network performance. They were using Apache Flink to collect and process about 35 million metrics every hour. Learn why and how they moved their infrastructure to Apache Pinot for instant data availability and low query latency.
• Crowdstrike: Apache Pinot in Action: Real-Time Analytics at Crowdstrike — Cybersecurity is more critical than ever in history. Discover the driving factors for Crowdstrike moving two key workloads to Apache Pinot: system load protection services, and security analytics. Learn how they integrated Pinot seamlessly with their continuous Apache Kafka data feeds to scale and support 5 billion events on a single cluster at a rate of 25,000 queries per second.
• Grab: Real-Time Marketplace Observability — Grab is the Southeast Asian “superapp,” combining ridesharing, delivery and digital financial services for over 40 million monthly active users. They used Apache Pinot to provide real-time dashboards driven by timely, accurate and reliable metrics. Pinot allowed Grab to gather consistent metrics everywhere and conduct early detection and diagnosis of issues anywhere across the eight countries they operate in.
• Nubank: Spark Real-Time Observability — This Brazilian-based fintech powerhouse employs Apache Spark at petabyte scale to serve as the heart of its real-time data platform, supporting its 100 million customers’ financial needs. Nubank then employed Apache Pinot for observability of the 300,000 daily Spark jobs run daily, measuring platform resiliency, monitoring datasets, and even recommending performance tuning, accounting for high disk spills, data skews and volumes.
• Amazon Web Services: Building Real-Time GenAI Pipelines with Apache Pinot and AWS — This session is a can’t-miss. It showcases Apache Pinot’s vector indexing capabilities and how to integrate Pinot with a real-time streaming data pipeline architecture powered by AWS services, as well as GenAI services such as AWS Bedrock. Imagine doing real-time insights from social media, such as ingesting Reddit updates, processing them through Apache Pinot in real-time, and allowing users to ask questions of an LLM to get definitive answers in a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture. Watch the session to see exactly how they built it.

That’s a glimpse into the many sessions you’ll find once you register for Real-Time Analytics Summit. Our thanks to all of the amazing presenters, all of the program committee who helped us put the event together, and to all the staff who ran one heck of a show. And also, thanks from everyone here at StarTree to the thousands of Apache Pinot community members, and to all registrants and attendees of this year’s summit who made the day so special.