Sramana Mitra: In this picture that you have presented, where do you see gaps or problems? These could be smaller problems or niche problems. Where would you point entrepreneurs to look for opportunities to start companies? Where are the open spaces and blue-sky opportunities? Billy Bosworth: I am a little biased based on where I
Sramana Mitra: What does the competitive landscape look like? Of course there is a lot going on in big data. How do you view the map and the competitive landscape? How do you position yourself in that ecosystem with that competitive landscape? Billy Bosworth: I have been around databases for a long time. This is
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
Sramana Mitra: The map that is emerging in my mind is that you are doing all the big data processing on your side, whether it is Adobe building a product on top of your platform, or eBay or Netflix building certain capabilities in their transactional systems. That is how you go to the market. Is
Sramana Mitra: I would like you to do two more use cases. Feel free to pick whatever would be a good illustration of your functionality. Bill Bosworth: What we tend to focus on is the following: When we work with larger companies, many of them have lines of business that are trying to fundamentally change
Sramana Mitra: That brings me to my next question. What kinds of use cases were your founders seeing? Let’s get into some of those use cases where you as a company bring special value. Billy Bosworth: I will give you one which is a pure Cassandra use case. This was a very early customer, Netflix.
Billy Bosworth is the CEO of DataStax, a big data company based in San Mateo, California. It provides a scalable, flexible big data platform built on Apache Cassandra. DataStax has more than 250 customers, including startups and several Fortune 100 companies. Billy got a degree in computer science from the University of Louisville and counts