Big Data is accessible for any organization – whether big or small, reaching across the spectrum of data demands, in clouds throughout the world – and your best possible data infrastructure can be achieved quickly, easily and with cost-effectiveness with DataStax and Apache Cassandra. In a recent conversation with DataStax CEO Billy Bosworth, we talked about the growing market and infrastructure opportunities that are steadily being realized with their enterprise-ready big data platform. In doing so, the company is witnessing a growing wave of interest in breaking free of dependence on Oracle for their database requirements, and customers are finding that especially when it comes to enterprise and cloud features, DataStax’s Apache Cassandra NoSQL-based platform has advantages across the board. Today’s announcement typifies that relational database exodus, as DataStax has highlighted the addition of Netflix, OpenWave, and Ooyala as the latest significant enterprise customers that have made the move.

Netflix

A number of enterprise attributes have helped drive these companies to DataStax – and they stand out throughout these stories. Take a big well-known fish like Netflix.  Netflix is one of the largest cloud platforms in the world, and they have as you can imagine immense data requirements. Downtime in their business hits the headlines quickly, so they could not afford a single point of failure and they needed the ability to scale – those kind of issues are exactly what drove Netflix from Oracle to Cassandra. You can check the most demanding of business requirements off the list because the infrastructure they have now is scalable, flexible, quickly deployed and high performance across the board with a global data distribution model.  It is quickly being realized across the industry that a new data solution is required for today’s demands, in today’s infrastructure and Cassandra is delivering on that in case after case.

OpenWave Messaging

OpenWave Messaging focused on some different benefits. They were looking for a database component to drive their leading-edge global messaging software platform. Their solution wishlist required performance, resiliency, and availability and the DataStax Cassandra platform delivered on those where others couldn’t. Even further, the hardware it cost to run the solution was much lower cost – 1/10th of the price of the hardware required to run the same capacity on an Oracle system.

Ooyala

Ooyala is a startup that is a digital video data giant. Its hundreds of clients process massive volumes of video across the world – running analysis, statistics, management, and monetizing on their platform. It is quoted that 200 million unique viewers watch an Ooyala-powered video each month and the company enables HD-quality video to over 130 countries. That is a quintessential scale case study and a perfect place for big data. That’s where Oracle’s MySQL couldn’t deliver and DataStax Cassandra did. With a predictable, flexible, and scalable performance data solution, Ooyala continues its massive global operations and is able to quickly add capacity.

A Perfect Storm

Bosworth says it’s pretty clear what’s happening. He calls it a ‘perfect storm’ – a confluence of events that set the tone for a data revolution. First off, the open-source technology is ready for the enterprise and is being proven out in the marketplace across the board. Cassandra is truly a cloud-ready enterprise feature data solution. All of that is compelling, but on top of that we have this incredible story of cost savings – acolytes of TCO and ROI advantages delight in the facts and figures that are possible, especially when you are able to break free of the Oracle contract/support/hardware cycle. There is certainly a lot of attention being paid to the movement, which also drives the final element and that is passion. The question a lot of people may have on their minds if they move to Cassandra how are they going to drive this ship? Well there’s a lot of passion in the community. As Bosworth notes (who at one point in history once wore the hat of an Oracle admin) – When your reach out into the community, you will be hard pressed to find anyone excited about the Oracle database path. The talent is interested in big data, interested in Cassandra, and it’s growing day by day. The open-source community that is built around this thing is strong and it isn’t going anywhere.

No one is left by the wayside either, the DataStax Cassandra makes the answers of delivery and deployment of their big data solution easy to reach for any organization. That’s the most compelling thing about their solution, putting big data and everything about it within reach. So we can expect to see this massive database disruption and for DataStax specifically, these continued success stories, adding to their base of over 250 customers. The team that powers the company is itself passionate, and they know that they are experiencing an incredible time in the industry. This week they are hosting the Cassandra Summit 2013 in San Francisco.