DataStax Accelerates Asia Pacific Growth With New Regional Office in Singapore

DataStax has announced the opening of a new regional APAC office in Singapore.

This expansion reinforces its commitment to the Asia-Pacific (APAC) market and enables the company to meet the growing global demand for Astra DB.

Touted by DataStax as an open data stack for modern data apps, Astra is essentially a

database-as-a-service (DBaaS) offering built on Apache Cassandra.

Apache Cassandra is an open-source NoSQL database known for its ability to handle huge amounts of data distributed across multiple nodes for reliability and lightning-fast access. It is deployed by many of the largest tech firms such as Facebook – Cassandra was originally developed there – Apple, Instagram, Spotify and Netflix, among others.

DataStax recently received an undisclosed amount of new funding from Goldman Sachs, and its entry into APAC is part of a strategic move to tap into the market opportunity here. According to a Research and Markets report, APAC is projected to have the highest growth rate for the cloud database and DBaaS market over the forecast period of 2020 to 2025.

Deb Dutta, an industry veteran with over 25 years of experience driving strategy, growth, marketing, operations and organisation buildout, has joined DataStax as general manager of the APAC region.

He had previously held leadership positions with global enterprise technology leaders including McAfee, Brocade and Juniper Networks. Dutta will be responsible for building the team, expanding enterprise engagements, strategic partnerships and accelerating DataStax’s growth across APAC.

“DataStax continues to see rapid adoption of Cassandra in a form factor which is easy to operate, developer ready, cloud-delivered and presents a dramatic reduction in TCO. We recently launched Astra DB, which is the first serverless deployment based on Apache Cassandra that works on all three major public clouds,” said Dutta.

“I am thrilled to join DataStax to help connect developers and enterprises in APAC to the power of Apache Cassandra by engaging, enabling and empowering them,” he said.

Also joining Dutta is Aaron Morton from New Zealand. He will support this expansion as a technical expert in APAC.

Morton is a veteran of Apache Cassandra, with contributions dating back to 2010. He is a committer to the core codebase and a member of the Project Management Committee (PMC) for Cassandra.

Astra is available as a serverless solution that lets users get started quickly without the need to specify or provision a set capacity of nodes. Customers pay only for what they use and can opt to have nodes deployed within Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure – or a mix of all three.

DataStax’s customers in Singapore include fintech Endowus and international banking corporation SC Ventures (Nexus).

Suresh Khatri, Head of Engineering, SC Ventures (Nexus) said: “With more than 750 branches worldwide and a presence in 59 markets, SC Ventures (Nexus) relies on DataStax to help provide a secure, distributed database infrastructure.”