Last year was a good year for NoSQL outfit DataStax. The big data company’s customer base increased roughly tenfold to 270, including 20 Fortune 100 firms and names such as eBay, Netflix and Thomson Reuters. It also picked up a $ 25 million C round in October, with one of the intended uses of that funding being global expansion. Now it’s making good on that promise by opening a European subsidiary.
The DataStax Enterprise 3 big data bundle fuses Hadoop with the Apache Cassandra database and Apache Solr enterprise search platform, creating what CEO Billy Bosworth claims is “the first viable alternative to Oracle since Oracle.” The big selling points here are linear scalability, operational simplicity and an emphasis on business continuity.
As the company has noticed that much of its new customer base was sited in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), its latest move makes sense: DataStax has opened up a London office, and it’s a full-on subsidiary rather than just a branch office.
As Bosworth told me, the idea here is to be able to respond quickly to European market demands, which range from language variation to a different style of partnership:
“Without any presence in EMEA, we ended up in 2012 with 10 percent of our customers located in the EMEA region – that was 100 percent inbound; we didn’t do any programs or outbound activity. We have Scoreloop in Germany, the mobile gaming platform, and Trademob, the mobile app platform. We have mobile carriers who are decommissioning Oracle because they have to have a multi-data-center solution, and a London-based bank chose DataStax over Oracle for their ecommerce platform.
“In the UK, the business aspect of it is not that different from the U.S. … but as you move into the European continent, you do want to have some local language skills. And when you move into France and Spain and Italy, now you’re into a very boutique partner network. Those partners have very good relationships with their customers but are often not on the same scale as a big [systems integrator] like Accenture. The only way to really get close enough to that partner network is for us to be in the region as well.”
With a portfolio as open-source-centric as DataStax’s is, Bosworth added, the company is also looking forward to hosting “a ton of meet-ups in the region” in the coming months.
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