When the person who wrote ClickHouse decides to fly halfway across the world to meet customers in person, you make space on the calendar. When he decides to do it in five countries in twelve days, you start wondering if he secretly runs on the same query engine he built.
Last month, our CTO and the creator of ClickHouse, Alexey Milovidov, embarked on a crazy 12-day APJ tour that would have flattened most mortals. Mumbai, Bengaluru, Singapore, Jakarta, Seoul, Tokyo. Customer meetings, keynotes, executive roundtables, press interviews, and meetups - often on the same day, sometimes on opposite ends of a city, occasionally on opposite ends of a continent.
Here's how it went down.
First Pitstop: India - Mumbai & Bangalore (April 13–18) #
Alexey landed in Mumbai just after midnight on Sunday, April 12, fresh off a KLM flight from Amsterdam. The first stop was the Confluent Data Streaming World Tour at the Jio World Convention Centre, where Alexey took the stage to talk about real-time analytics at the scale our customers are actually running. A 30-minute speaking slot, followed by an ET Executive Roundtable, followed by a press interview. Welcome to APJ.
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The next two days in Mumbai were back-to-back customer meetings across very different industries, different workloads, different scale problems but the same underlying need for real-time analytics that actually keeps up.
Then on Thursday, April 16, Alexey and Chris Rodrigues, our Senior Field Marketing Manager based in Australia, flew down to Bengaluru for the Bengaluru edition of Confluent's Data Streaming World Tour. Another speaking slot, another roundtable, another press cycle. That evening was spent at the PeakXV (formerly Sequoia India) executive roundtable, a room full of founders and operators from across the Indian tech ecosystem.
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Friday added two more customer meetings before the week closed with the Bengaluru ClickHouse Meetup at Awfis Residency Square on Saturday. If you've ever attended a ClickHouse meetup, you know they tend to run long. This one was no exception.
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Next Stop: Singapore → Jakarta (April 19–20) #
Sunday morning, IndiGo 1091 to Singapore. By Monday, Alexey was in customer brown-bag technical sessions across town, then straight back to Changi for a Singapore Airlines flight to Jakarta. Land, hotel, and host the Jakarta ClickHouse Meetup at The Glasshouse, Ritz Carlton Pacific Place - all in a single day.
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Tuesday in Jakarta was the Data Streaming World Tour Jakarta, where Alexey did a fireside chat with Nick, Field CTO at Confluent. That was followed by an executive luncheon with prospects and customers, and capped with an evening flight to Seoul.
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Onward to Seoul (April 22) #
A single day in Seoul, but a heavy one - two customer meetings with major Korean enterprises, spanning conversations from connected products to analytics at industrial scale.
A press interview followed, and then the Seoul ClickHouse Meetup at DreamPlus Gangnam - the Korean community has been growing fast, and Alexey wanted to show up for them in person.
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Final Stop: Japan (April 23–27) #
The Japan leg was anchored by two things: customer meetings with major Japanese enterprises, and the ClickHouse Japan Launch Event on Monday, April 27 - a milestone moment as we officially planted our flag in the Japan market.
Between customer conversations, a Langfuse Night with partners, press, a team dinner, and the launch itself, it was a fitting finale to twelve days on the road.
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What 12 days looks like in numbers #
- 5 countries: India, Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea, Japan
- 6 cities: Mumbai, Bangalore, Singapore, Jakarta, Seoul, Tokyo
- 6 flights across three weeks
- 3 major industry events: Confluent Data Streaming World Tour in Mumbai, Bangalore, and Jakarta
- 4 ClickHouse meetups: Bangalore, Jakarta, Seoul, and the Langfuse Night
- 10+ enterprise customer meetings across a wide range of industries
- A market launch: ClickHouse, officially in Japan
Why It Mattered #
It would have been easy for Alexey to do this from a webcam. He didn't. And that's the point.
ClickHouse has always been built in the open, by people who actually use it. Showing up - in Mumbai's Jio Convention Centre, on a stage in Jakarta, at a meetup in Bangalore's Awfis Residency Square, in a customer's office in Seoul - this is how that culture scales beyond GitHub contributions. The questions you get from a data engineer in person are not the same questions you get on a Zoom call. The conversations at a Bangalore meetup at 10 AM on a Saturday are not the conversations you have in a sales deck.
APJ is one of the fastest-growing regions for ClickHouse, and the customers Alexey met on this trip are pushing the engine in ways that keep making ClickHouse better for everyone alongside what we're seeing from customers in the US, EMEA, and beyond. That feedback loop only works if the creator of the database is in the room.
Twelve days. Five countries. One very tired CTO but a super satisfied one, and a whole lot of new ClickHouse stories from across APJ.
Huge thanks to the APJ team: Cheryl, Chris, Sid, Zoe, Lalit, Anshul, Mit, Rahul, Narasingh, Rakesh, Swaroop, Piyush, Rana, Bryan, Si Shuo, Maruthi, Sunny, Ken, Ted, Takeshi, Kiyo, Masato, Yasuhiro, Miki, Tomoko and everyone behind the scenes for pulling this off. And thanks to every customer, partner, and community member who made the time to meet us.
Be in the know when Alexey's back in the region by joining our Slack community.
