Momentum, Change, and Moving to the Future

For several years DataStax has worked with customers in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Recently, our roadmap has intensified and accelerated in response to customer demands. We all know that cloud is changing every aspect of business—both for our customers, and for ourselves. We must continue to challenge ourselves to rethink the products we build and develop new ways to take them to market.

To that end, we made some big product announcements in May at our Accelerate conference. Our most exciting news by far was the announcement of DataStax Constellation, our new cloud data platform designed to make it easy for developers to build modern applications, and easier for ops teams to manage those applications—regardless of where they are deployed. These are entirely new opportunities for DataStax and have required us to make changes in every part of our business.

Realizing the full potential of what we can accomplish with Constellation will require adjusting every function to this new landscape. As with all meaningful change, some will be fun and exciting, and some will be incredibly hard. In our case, we need to quickly add many new positions in order to expand our cloud-native offerings. Our belief as a company is, and always has been, that we will grow the business responsibly—and that means that we cannot just add new costs and increase expenses. Therefore, we have made the difficult decision to restructure our organization.

Today, we said a heartfelt goodbye to some employees who have made incredible contributions to our success. This is not something that we take lightly. We said goodbye to people who are valued colleagues and, in many cases, close friends. Where we could, we moved people from previous roles into new teams that are part of the future plan. Unfortunately, at our size that does not work for all positions, and as a result, we needed to remove a little less than 10% of the company as part of the restructuring. This has been a time of tough decisions and we have done everything we can to transition these valued people with dignity and compassion.

Going forward, we are now structured and hiring to successfully bring the Constellation platform and cloud-native offerings to market. Working with our cloud partners, this fall we will deliver as-a-service offerings for both Cassandra and Insights; as well as contribute to open-source developer communities to pioneer advances in Apache Cassandra™, and our own portfolio. To accomplish all of this and as part of the restructuring, we need to hire about 100 new employees to bring the talent needed to deliver our roadmap.

Our next generation of products is off to a good start. At Accelerate, we ran our developer bootcamp using an early, hands-on preview of our first offering on Constellation, DataStax Apache Cassandra as a Service. The result was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and positive feedback on its power and ease of use. That real-world reaction to Constellation accelerated our own decision to invest even more aggressively.

So we move forward, with deep gratitude to all those who helped us accomplish all that has been done, and with excitement for all that is to come.