UPDATED 20:11 EDT / OCTOBER 22 2019

BIG DATA

Former Google VP Chet Kapoor joins DataStax as CEO

Database company DataStax Inc. has a new chief executive officer today: former Google LLC Vice President Chet Kapoor.

He replaces outgoing CEO Billy Bosworth, who will leave the company in a few weeks following a short transition period.

Bosworth said in a blog post that DataStax began its search for a new CEO earlier this year, selecting Kapoor from a long list of candidates. He added that he has been working closely with Kapoor for some time already to facilitate his arrival.

Kapoor takes over at a time when DataStax is trying to broaden its appeal beyond its traditional base of Apache Cassandra users. The company offers a commercialized version of that database, which competes against cloud-based offerings such as Google’s Cloud Spanner and Amazon Web Services Inc.’s DynamoDB.

Earlier this year it expanded its offering with the launch of DataStax Constellation, which is a cloud-native version of the Cassandra database that’s said to be more flexible, scalable and simpler to deploy.

Bosworth said that he, Kapoor and the company’s board all agreed it was time for a “new perspective to execute our vision.”

“We needed a more ambitious, bold approach across the company,” Bosworth said in his letter.

Kapoor had served as a Google VP for three years prior to joining DataStax, working on the development of artificial intelligence-powered tools for education. Before that he served as the CEO of Apigee Inc., which sold a cross-cloud application programming interface management platform and was acquired by Google for $625 million in 2016.

Photo: Twitter

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