A New Mandate for DataStax: Real-Time AI for Everyone

SUPER excited to share that DataStax has acquired Kaskada, a machine learning company with technology that helps customers get more value from time-based event data. By bringing together Kaskada and DataStax’s product stack, we’ll be able to provide an end-to-end solution for real-time artificial intelligence (AI) – for everyone.

AI is hard, but possible 

We all know AI has been the buzz for years, but most companies still haven’t benefited from real-time AI at scale. AI works best when you have large amounts of real-time data, but many are struggling to activate their data today. Even those with real-time data are failing to do real-time AI. This happens because data is served too slowly via complicated environments that make real-time actions almost impossible. AI can’t work with the wrong data, at the wrong time, delivered by the wrong infrastructure.

Leading enterprises like Google, Netflix, and Uber know how to drive transformation with real-time AI. Their ML models are embedded in their applications and use the same real-time data. They aggregate events in real-time through streaming services and expose this data to ML models. And they have a database that can store massive volumes of event data.

DataStax + Kaskada = unlocking real-time AI

The team at Kaskada – led by Davor Bonaci, the creator of Apache Beam – has created a powerful machine-learning feature engine that processes massive amounts of time-based event data, enabling applications to use millions of predictions based on unique contexts, without human intervention.

ML is most successful with large volumes of real-time data, and this is what DataStax does best. We’ve built Astra DB, a highly scalable Cassandra database-as-a-service optimized for customer context and instant access. And there’s Astra Streaming, an open-source messaging and streaming technology built on Apache Pulsar that aggregates billions of events and makes customer actions visible to applications. We’re already partnering with companies like Uniphore, which applies AI to sales communications to build better customer relationships, and Barracuda Networks, which applies AI and ML to identify security threats.

By adding Kaskada to our multi-cloud offerings, we will deliver a simple solution that brings ML to data—not the other way around. This unlocks a whole new class of intelligent applications. Instantly personalized content, real-time adjustments to factory production lines, and next-generation cyber security at global scale will be available to everyone—all in one unified environment. 

Our mandate

Every company should be able to deploy real-time AI at scale like Netflix, without investing headcount or budget. We are really excited to deliver an end-to-end cloud service that will make real-time AI possible for everyone. 

Kaskada shares our commitment to open source communities, and we look forward to open sourcing the core Kaskada technology as soon as possible. We plan to include our new machine learning service as part of our offerings later this year.

Our mandate is clear: Make it possible for anyone with real-time data to do real-time AI. With the Kaskada acquisition, a vibrant and growing group of organizations that depend on DataStax to manage massive data in real time, and a refreshed brand that launched today, I’ve never been more confident in DataStax’s future. 

To learn more about the power of real-time AI, check out the white paper and video and sign up for ongoing updates, product details, and additional insights into how DataStax is making real-time AI a reality.