DataStax adds Oracle to provide practical collaboration
- Summary:
- A partnership of DataStax with Oracle could give large enterprises a way to build collaborative analytics applications that span business and data management.
The current DataStax total of 400 customers is likely to get at least a bit of a boost, and probably quite a significant one, following the announcement that its DataStax Enterprise (DSE) geographically distributed operational management system is now available to work within the Oracle Data Hub managed service environment.
DataStax CEO Billy Bosworth reckons that Oracle is run by at least 70% of the Fortune 8000 major global enterprises. Most of these also run Microsoft applications, so the fact that DSE is already approved for use with the Microsoft Azure cloud offering should give these users the opportunity to build and manage more real time applications and services that exploit collaboration between Oracle and Microsoft environments.
DSE is a distribution of the Apache Cassandra system, an open source Non-SQL database management system designed to handle large amounts of data across many commodity server systems, with the key advantage of avoiding any single point of failure. It adds a range of functionality targeting the needs of new cloud-based applications, such as robust graph, analytics and search capabilities, together with a consistent security model that runs across all the data services covered by a DSE environment.
Because it can be run by users on any commodity cloud service, rather than a dedicated DataStax cloud service, it gives the users freedom to build their own networks of hosted services that provide the latency and operational resilience they require.
In addition, it also provides the developer tooling needed to build those collaborative applications, and is designed to provide the underpinning necessary for creating big data analytics applications, spanning across multiple, different, database applications, that large enterprises require in practice.
The addition of Oracle to the roster of DataStax partners maps well onto Oracle’s own moves into the provision of cloud services. This, in practice, is a step that many Oracle users are likely make over time, if only because it should eventually provide a route to move beyond the restrictions of the company’s licencing model. BSE is available on a subscription basis that is chargeable either by the core or the node, which should fit with both old and new pricing regimes.
It also has the flexibility to operate across the range of operational environments, from 100% on-premise to 100% cloud, which should also fit well with Oracle users looking to build collaborative big analytics applications at the same time as moving from on premise to the Oracle Cloud service.
It is expected by the company to give a much greater number of large enterprise users around the world the chance to build collaborative analytical applications that require very large volumes of widely distributed data – a common logistical fact for many such companies – without the risks associated with creating additional, huge data lakes to put that data in a central location in order to be processed.
My take
As the applications and database systems of Oracle and Microsoft, individually or combined, lie at the heart of nearly all the Fortune 8000 list of enterprises, the opportunity now to combine them in new collaborative applications may be just what some of those businesses are looking for.