Avengers Fan Frustration Highlights Importance of Database Technology

How do you know it’s time to upgrade your database technology?

When your fans can't buy tickets to your latest blockbuster movie, for example—as recently happened with Avengers fans trying to buy tickets on Fandango and other sites—or buy the latest smartphone, or re-book a flight that got cancelled, or one of the many other 'I have to have it NOW' things that millions and millions of consumers do every day.

One of the clearest indicators of using obsolete database technology, and likely a poor data architecture holding things together, is millions of frustrated fans wishing they had other ways to purchase your product.

The part that is so frustrating to those of us in the technology industry is that this is all completely avoidable with modern NoSQL technology like Apache Cassandra™, and the enterprise version of this, from DataStax.

Today’s data architectures need to accommodate millions of transactions in very short periods of time, and even more importantly (and harder), they need to be able to provide the data where and when their customers need it: locally at the endpoint device (think smartphones).

Here’s the problem: nobody knows where every consumer will be or exactly when they’ll engage to buy their movie ticket, or even more importantly, how long they’ll be willing to wait to get confirmation before they click away to another site. Because these consumers are highly distributed and have very short attention spans and demand instant confirmation for things, and because there are millions and millions of them, enterprises today need technology that can keep up, that can handle real-time demands at cloud scale.

And here’s the ironic part: The vendors of these obsolete legacy technologies keep saying that all you need is more hardware, more instances of the database, and more add-on technology to replicate copies of the data all over the place.

The problem is that this legacy technology was never intended for today's loads and expectations. And yet, companies try to keep it running with more glue and tape (you know the kind...) and bubble gum. And when it all comes crashing down, it’s devastating to reputation and brand satisfaction, or Net Promoter Score (NPS). Recovering from that mass negative publicity takes years if you are lucky to recover at all.

The good news is that there’s a relatively easy solution to fix these issues—and even better, prevent them from even happening in the first place. How? By overhauling your data architecture with a highly scalable, always-on, active everywhere database that allows you to take full advantage of hybrid and multi-cloud computing environments.

Modern applications running in hybrid cloud—as long as they’re built and running on the right kind of database—don’t go down and don’t leave your customers waiting or wanting more. Period.

For a closer look into what you can do to avoid becoming the next headline about a negative customer experience, contact DataStax. We can help you not only avoid the negative brand experience but accelerate your growth and innovation in this data-driven, “I need it now” world.

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