IBM said it will acquire DataStax in a move that will help it build out its watsonx genAI portfolio with various open source tools.
Financial details weren't disclosed.
DataStax is the company behind AstraDB, DataStax Enterprise and tools that are falling under the Apache Cassandra open source project. IBM said it will continue to support DataStax's participation in projects such as Apache Cassandra, Langflow, Apache Pulsar, and OpenSearch.
The plan for IBM is to leverage DataStax's technologies and combine them with its Granite large language models. IBM will also be a bigger player in vector databases and leveraging unstructured data for enterprises.
DataStax competes with Couchbase and MongoDB among others.
- DataStax acquires Logspace and its Langflow platform
- Constellation ShortList™ Hybrid-Cloud and MultiCloud NoSQL Databases
Specific plans include:
- IBM will add DataStax AstraDB and DataStax Enterprise to watsonx.data.
- DataStax will bring vector and graphRAG capabilities to watsonx.
- IBM will also have tighter integration with Langflow via DataStax.
In a blog post, DataStax CEO Chet Kapoor said the companies have worked together on multiple joint customer projects.
"DataStax and IBM have collaborated in the market since 2020, serving customers such as T-Mobile, Audi, The Home Depot, and Intuit," said Kapoor. "Over the last year, DataStax introduced HCD and Mission Control, further bringing Cassandra into the cloud-native era, deployed on top of IBM OpenShift."
The deal is expected to close in the second quarter.
Constellation Research analyst Doug Henschen said:
"DataStax brings IBM both high-scale NoSQL software and cloud services that provide the data underpinning for online giants ranging from Netflix, Overstock and Priceline to Dataworkz, Digital River and Intuit. The press release mostly addresses GenAI opportunities, by way of DataStax's 2024 introduction of vector storage and embedding capabilities, but the underlying platform is solid and geared to massive, global-scale deployments."
DataStax has faced increased competition in recent years, primarily from Public Cloud providers, leading with AWS, which offers both DynamoDB (a similarly scalable NoSQL database) and Amazon Keyspaces (for Apache Cassandra).
It will be interesting to see whether big, cloud-native customers (Netflix, Priceline, Overstock, etc.) with skilled engineering teams turn to self-managing Cassandra in the wake of this acquisition."
