High Availability by Design: Sergei Shestakov's Journey from Enterprise Tech to Unbreakable Data Architectures

When a bank's payment network crashes, the ramifications are felt throughout the entire customer base. Transactions freeze, users grow frustrated, and millions of dollars evaporate by the minute. It's a nightmare that Sergei Shestakov calls unacceptable, which is why he's dedicated his career to making sure it never happens on his watch.

Throughout his career, Sergei has worked on everything from redundant payment cores for commercial banks to stock depository platforms handling millions in daily transactions. Now, his Richmond-based startup, MPP Insights, is bringing battle-tested principles of high availability to a market that's desperate for reliable infrastructure that can keep pace with exploding data demands.

The way Sergei sees it, high availability is not just technical architecture — it's business survival.

Building Bulletproof Systems When Money's on the Line

By Sergei's fourth year at St. Petersburg State Technical University, he wasn't just studying; he was leading a team-building enterprise software for a stock depository, a system that handled everything from stock issuance to ownership transfers and reporting. It was an environment where one mistake could mean serious financial losses.

His fifth year took him to a commercial bank, where he turned manual stock reporting into an automated system that pulled information straight from stock exchanges and generated all required reports.

But his real challenge came in year six. This was when Sergei worked at yet another commercial bank, building an X.25 electronic payment network from the ground up—basically, a specialized bank transaction system using industrial-grade telecommunications hardware and built-in backup systems at every critical point. This wasn't about flashy tech or cool features; it was about building something that wouldn't crash when people needed their money. The system Sergei built connected payment processing, POS networks, ATMs, and the underlying network infrastructure into what he calls 'data-centric architecture'—an approach that would later become standard in all his work.

By 2001, he was promoted to the position of e-payments centre manager, leading a team of 30 as he made sure the bank's entire card business ran without a hitch—from authorization systems to ATM networks. Two years later, he took charge of all IT services for the bank's card business infrastructure, leading a team that had grown to 50 people. But the mission never changed: Build systems that don't break, and bounce back fast when problems hit.

School of Hard Knocks: Learning Entrepreneurship the Hard Way

Like many technical founders, Sergei didn't exactly nail entrepreneurship on his first try.

'I've made early attempts in entrepreneurship, paving my way with bricks of trial and error,' he admits. 'First, I tried to create a business as a solopreneur. But it appeared that having the right technology and acting alone is not enough to guarantee steady sales.'

After a partnership that didn't work out, Sergei went back to working for others, building up management experience and saving cash for his next inevitable attempt. In 2005, he launched his first real company with proper preparation—funding lined up and equity terms ready for potential co-founders. But even with better planning, finding the right market proved difficult.

By 2007, Sergei went back to what he knew best: enterprise software for B2B customers. This shift finally led to some big deals and positive cash flow until a telecom client that made up 70% of revenue suddenly killed their contract after deciding to stop competing with Skype.

'This was a lesson learned the hard way,' Sergei admits. 'Never become dependent on one major customer.'

The Pivot to Data-Centric Architecture

After this hard lesson, Sergei decided to specialize in business intelligence and launched Luxms Group. Under his leadership as CEO, Luxms offered powerful data visualisation and business intelligence tools for enterprise clients, earning recognition across the industry as it secured top positions in national ratings for BI providers.

But as data volumes grew exponentially and clients needed more sophisticated analyses, Sergei began to notice fundamental limitations in the traditional approach to data architecture, which just couldn't handle modern analytics and AI workloads efficiently.

His answer was a data-centric architecture approach, which he published in a 2018 paper and presented at the International Conference on Applications in Information Technology.

'This data-centric architecture, where you put business logic next to your data inside the PostgreSQL database, provides unbeatable scalability, reliability, security, and speed when working with huge amounts of data,' Sergei explains.

This approach wasn't just theory; it became the foundation for real solutions.

MPP: Bringing High Availability to Business Intelligence

In 2022, Sergei launched MPP Labs in Armenia to build an international R&D centre that tapped into local university talent. The company grew to a team of 15 seasoned experts, specializing in end-to-end data analytics services—from data collection and processing to visualization and AI/ML solutions.

In March 2025, Sergei and his partner, Peter Bilzerian, launched MPP Insights in Richmond, Virginia, to target the US market. Unlike most BI vendors, MPP Insights delivers an end-to-end solution that leverages massively parallel processing databases (the 'MPP' in the company name) to rapid analytics performance while ensuring the high availability that's been Sergei's trademark. This allows clients to track critical metrics without the system failures that are common with heavy analytical loads.

MPP Insights offers a specialized, low-code ETL/ELT tool that accelerates and simplifies data processing, enabling teams to rapidly transform raw data into actionable insights without the typical performance bottlenecks. Its data governance framework provides structured policies, roles, and standards to ensure data remains accurate, consistent, secure, and compliant.

Above all else, Sergei has built MPP with high availability in mind, his motto being Intel founder Andy Grove's famous saying: 'Only the paranoid survive.' It's a principle he applies to both technical systems and business strategy—expect failures, build in backups, and never let a single point of failure take you down.

Keeping the Lights On in an AI-Powered World

As AI takes over more business functions, Sergei Shestakov's decades of building systems that can't afford to fail have put MPP Insights at the sweet spot between two things businesses desperately need: Bulletproof reliability and AI-ready infrastructure.

As businesses bet everything on data and AI, the systems supporting these technologies have to be unbreakable. Because when systems crash and business stops, being paranoid about uptime isn't crazy—it's the only sane approach.