September 22, 2011

DataStax pivots back to its original strategy

The DataStax and Cassandra stories are somewhat confusing. Unfortunately, DataStax chose to clarify them in what has turned out to be a crazy news week. I’m going to use this post just to report on the status of the DataStax product line, without going into any analysis beyond that.

Pro tip: If you choose to announce at a conference where many other vendors will surely announce news also, you naturally run the risk of not garnering much attention.

For starters, it may help to realize or recall that:

Various posts on the DataStax blog give DataStax’s explanation of what it’s doing. Ben Werther, the ex-Greenplum guy who briefly worked at DataStax and was most associated with telling the Hadoop/Brisk story, has moved on to his own startup Platfora.

DataStax Enterprise has three main aspects:

To describe DataStax Community Edition, I’ll just quote the press release verbatim, which characterizes it as:

… a free platform based on Apache Cassandra that bundles the open source database with smart installers, drivers and connectors for popular development languages, demo apps, documentation, and a free version of DataStax OpsCenter for Apache Cassandra.

DataStax Community Edition is crippleware only in terms of feature set; there are no limitations on its database size, cluster size, or usage rights. A core mission of DataStax Community Edition is to create happy Cassandra users, who may then become customers for DataStax Enterprise.

Comments

5 Responses to “DataStax pivots back to its original strategy”

  1. Jeremy Hanna on September 23rd, 2011 10:03 am

    What you have written is completely incorrect. DataStax is not backing away from Hadoop at all. Brisk is not dead, but is reborn in a larger suite of pay-for products. It’s pivoting to invest more in Brisk and make it a larger focus. They just received $11 million in series B funding and much of that is focused on investing in what Brisk is becoming – DataStax Enterprise. Please research and ask the company before writing something so inaccurate.

  2. Curt Monash on September 23rd, 2011 10:28 am

    Jeremy,

    I stand by my analysis, which is based on extensive conversation with DataStax’s top management.

    But then, what you’re criticizing is something different than what I actually wrote.

  3. Jeremy Hanna on September 23rd, 2011 10:34 am

    What I got from the article was that DataStax was backing away from Hadoop. That is not true.

  4. Curt Monash on September 23rd, 2011 11:10 am

    I stand by the sentence that used the phrase “backed away”, just as I stand by the rest of the article.

    I don’t necessarily stand by your misreading of that sentence.

  5. Jeremy Hanna on September 23rd, 2011 12:38 pm

    I apologize. I just know that there is already some misunderstanding in the community and the tweet that brought me to this post reflected that. I’ve just tried to work hard to help the Cassandra/Hadoop integration along for the past year and a half and didn’t want there to be misunderstanding on that front after a lot of work.

    Thanks for checking me on the rest of the article.

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