Data management firm DataStax today announced the opening of a new office in Singapore, which will also serve as its regional headquarters. DataStax says 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.
To help the Singapore office, Deb Dutta, an industry veteran with over 25 years of experience driving strategy, growth, marketing, operations, and organization buildout has joined DataStax as general manager of the APAC region.
Dutta 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.
Deb Dutta – General Manager, DataStax Asia Pacific 
Aaron Morton – Field Chief Technology Officer, DataStax Asia Pacific
“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.
Joining Dutta is New Zealand based Aaron Morton, who will support this expansion as a technical expert in APAC. Morton is a veteran of Apache Cassandra, starting his contributions in 2010. He is a committed to the core code base and a member of the Project Management Committee (PMC) for Cassandra.
“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, 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.”
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.
Base credits offered as part of all plans mean that usage volume of up to 30 million reads, 4.5 million writes, and 40GB of storage each month is free. According to the sign-up page here, no credit card is required to get started with Astra.
Though not mentioned in their launch announcement, DataStax also offers a self-managed solution called DataStax Enterprise for businesses to roll out their own on-premises or cloud-native deployments.
DataStax’s customers in Singapore include fintech Endowus and international banking corporation SC Ventures (Nexus).
Joo Lee, CTO, Endowus said: “Thanks to DataStax, we were able to easily move from one cloud provider to the next without inconveniencing our team or our customers. As a result, we have a future-proofed tech stack that will enable us to continue serving our users effectively as we continue to scale.”
DataStax recently received an undisclosed amount of new funding from Goldman Sachs, and its entry in 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.
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