Acceldata expands Europe push with new senior hires

Acceldata has expanded its operations in Europe as it adds senior hires in the region.

The data management company is responding to demand from enterprise customers that want to run AI data projects while meeting sovereignty and data control requirements. Many large organisations are trying to work across data spread between warehouses, lakehouses, clouds and on-premise systems without committing to long migration programmes.

At the centre of the European push is Acceldata's xLake platform, designed to let companies use data across multiple locations while keeping governance, residency and sovereignty controls in place. The platform supports hybrid and cloud deployments and is intended to help customers work with data where it resides rather than moving it into a single environment.

Acceldata has also reshaped its regional leadership team. Ali Afsar has joined as Senior Vice President, Data Strategy, while Colin Fernandes has been appointed Director of EMEA Market Development & Global Sales Enablement. Justyn Goodenough remains Vice President, EMEA, and is continuing to add staff to the field team.

Afsar brings more than 25 years of experience from HSBC, where he led data management and analytics programmes. Fernandes previously held similar roles at Sumo Logic and VMware.

European demand

The expansion reflects a broader shift among large companies as they look for ways to introduce AI into existing data estates. Many enterprises now operate a patchwork of data platforms, making it harder to apply common governance standards or build AI systems that can access information consistently.

Acceldata says it already supports customers processing more than one trillion data events a day. Its customer base includes seven of the top 12 banks, four of the top 10 life sciences companies, three of the top five telecoms operators and three of the top five global consumer packaged goods companies.

According to the company, customers are increasingly unwilling to undertake lengthy modernisation programmes before deploying AI. Instead, they want systems that can work across current infrastructure while keeping options open across clouds and on-premise environments.

"Enterprises realize that embarking on a multi-year data migration effort when the world is changing every six months is a recipe for getting left behind. They want AI to work with their data - now - and do that with governance controls, at the right cost, while maintaining architectural flexibility," said Rohit Choudhary, Founder and CEO, Acceldata.

"Alongside these challenges, enterprise IT teams also have to consider sovereignty, how this might affect their companies in future and how to prevent potential risk. Acceldata's xLake Data & AI Platform solves these problems, letting enterprises deliver AI and work with data where it is. For European enterprises, delivering on AI promises while supporting data sovereignty, jurisdiction-aware architectures, insights into the costs and value delivered around AI execution is rapidly becoming a board-level imperative," said Choudhary.

Hybrid estates

Research commissioned by Acceldata from GLG pointed to the scale of the challenge facing large businesses. It found that 80 per cent of enterprises run hybrid data infrastructures across data warehouse and data lakehouse environments.

Three-quarters of respondents said they operate four or more data platforms in production. The research also found that 43 per cent of enterprises still have at least some Hadoop workloads in place, while 47 per cent identified cross-lake governance as one of the biggest challenges to AI.

Those findings suggest that data fragmentation remains a practical obstacle for companies trying to move AI from pilot projects into broader use. They also help explain why suppliers focused on governance, observability and management of distributed data systems see room for growth in Europe, where concerns around data jurisdiction and sovereignty can be more pronounced.

Acceldata's approach is based on bringing compute, governance and data quality tools to the location where data already sits. In practice, that means supporting federated data across on-premise data centres, hybrid environments and multiple clouds rather than relying on a centralised lakehouse model.

The xLake platform includes products for data and AI observability, agent-led data management, data engineering, runtime support for data and AI workloads, and governance and secure access across different deployment models. Customers can also choose the AI model they consider most suitable and cost-effective for a given task.

Afsar said customers are under pressure to show measurable returns from AI spending as well as establish the right technical foundations.

"For enterprise AI leaders, the focus right now is on proving that business cases can be met. This comes down to two areas: getting the technical infrastructure correct so that enterprises can use their data effectively with AI projects, and delivering more accurate information on the costs to run agentic AI projects," said Ali Afsar, Senior Vice President, Data Strategy, Acceldata.

"Acceldata's xLake architecture helps teams with data observability, building data products, and AI projects for their companies, while supporting hybrid deployments and sovereignty requirements," said Afsar.