New business requirements are driving organizations to be more agile, deliver new customer-focused cloud applications, and support real-time data. The firms poised to develop these best-in-class apps of tomorrow are making data management a priority today. They realize that these new apps require data from many diverse sources, and that silos of data cannot be easily leveraged due to complexity, localization requirements, and extreme volume growth. Distributed databases have become critical for enterprises to succeed in the big data era by allowing them to overcome challenges around complex data structures, data silos, data availability, and data growth.