Accelerating Production AI and Bringing NoSQL Data at Scale to All Enterprises

Today we announced that IBM plans to acquire DataStax to accelerate production AI and NoSQL data at scale. Ritika Gunnar, GM of Data and AI at IBM, shares her perspective in this blog post. Here’s why I’m excited.

As enterprises adopt AI, they often struggle to leverage and deliver the knowledge locked in their enterprise data estate to power their AI agents and large language models. Industry leaders such as FedEx, Capital One, and Verizon have chosen DataStax and Apache Cassandra® to power their most mission-critical applications. As they seek to deliver on the promise of AI in production, bringing these together with scalable, secure, and accurate production AI becomes essential. We have long said that there is no AI without data, and this vision will now be propelled as DataStax joins IBM.

Generative AI has transformed the database space with the need to deliver context and knowledge in real time for highly accurate RAG applications and agents. Vector databases have emerged as a core necessity, but that’s just the starting point. DataStax’s hybrid vector database lets our customers unlock all of their data at any scale for building critical AI applications. DataStax’s Langflow open-source AI tool is used by tens of thousands of developers daily to prototype and deploy AI applications and agents, with over 49,000 stars on GitHub. With our technologies and IBM’s watsonx.data, their hybrid, open data lakehouse, we will be able to bring vector and AI search to the entire data estate and make IBM’s capabilities available to every developer.

In parallel, DataStax’s NoSQL products—our cloud service, Astra DB, and self-managed DataStax Enterprise—have been the standard for scale-out data delivered on top of Cassandra. DataStax and IBM have collaborated in the market since 2020, serving customers such as T-Mobile, Audi, The Home Depot, and Intuit. Over the last year, DataStax introduced HCD and Mission Control, further bringing Cassandra into the cloud-native era, deployed on top of IBM OpenShift. We’re excited to continue making Cassandra the standard for scaling out cloud-native data for our existing and future customers.

DataStax exemplifies serving our customers with inspired leadership. This mission will not change, and our commitment to support the many customers who use us as a key foundation of their most important infrastructure and mission-critical applications will be unwavering. DataStax has also been deeply committed to open-source principles and investing in the open-source community, especially the Cassandra project. We respect the leadership and stewardship that IBM has demonstrated with OSS and the great OSS companies that have found a home at IBM, like Red Hat and others, and we’re excited to become part of a company that understands the power of openness.

We’ll share more with you in the coming months. Please stay tuned!

 

Subject to close of the transaction and regulatory approval.