Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Billy Bosworth, CEO of DataStax (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So, that means a large number of your customers are basically Internet companies.  Companies that provide Internet services or Internet retail, e-commerce, and so on. Is that correct?

Billy Bosworth: That is certainly not uncommon. Overall, I would not say Internet companies, but that their applications are Internet based. That is the better way to put it.

SM: If you have a major multi-channel retailer with a major e-commerce business, that is still an Internet business.

BB: Exactly. So it is the Internet applications – they could be a traditional  company or a complete e-commerce company, but yes, you are correct.

SM: How many customers do you cater to today?

BB: At the end of 2012, we had about 260 customers.

SM: The kinds of use cases that you gave us, like eBay or Netflix, what kind of revenue do those bring to you? Are they $1 million deals, $5 million deals? What is the business?

BB: I can tell you how we license it, but we don’t share information on dollar amounts in that fashion.

SM: But in general, how are the infrastructure services that you offer priced?

BB: We price them like any other software technology. What you get is a subscription, a per node licencing model.  As you add nodes or machines to your system, you pay for each of those machines that you add. What you get with that is all of software called DataStax Enterprise, a product called OpsCenter, which is a graphical monitoring and management tool to help you easily manage that system, and you get your support. When you have problems and you call in, that is all provided under the subscription to DataStax Enterprise. We also don’t charge for licencing our software in non-production environments. If you want support, then you would call us on that, but if you just want to get up and get started, you can download that without any obligation.

SM: Is it an infrastructure as a service business model?

BB: Absolutely not. This is a key point we should make sure gets squared away. We do not offer infrastructure as a service. You can’t come to us and simply pay us and we flip it on and you just connect to us and start using it. It is software that you download and install wherever you want to install it. Think of it like when you buy an Oracle database. You install that Oracle database and manage it from where you are. When you buy from us, you download the product, you install it on any number of nodes you want (we don’t care if those nodes are in the cloud, in multiple clouds, on premise or any combination thereof) and you manage it. We do not provide a hosted environment where you would come and use a set of infrastructures as a service.

SM: So it is a software service, but not quite.

BB: Yes. It also enables hybridization. We are finding that a lot of customers are starting to dip their toes in the water of moving their classic infrastructure to the cloud, but they don’t want to do it all at once. Because we are a multi data center, we make that very easy. We say, “OK, why don’t you take 20 nodes on the premises and then maybe five nodes and out them on the cloud somewhere? See how that goes.” Or, “Let’s take five nodes and put them on a private cloud and let’s take 20 nodes and put them on our standard infrastructure.” We enable people to start moving in that direction at their own pace.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Billy Bosworth, CEO of DataStax
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