2022 Recap: A Year for Customers, Community, and Real-Time Data

These are the final days of 2022 and it’s been an interesting year. The world faced economic uncertainty, geopolitical tensions, and ongoing pandemic impact. Despite all of this, we made huge progress toward delivering a real-time data cloud to enterprises and developers.

First of all, a big THANK YOU to our customers, the Apache Cassandra and Apache Pulsar communities for your continued trust and partnership. Below are highlights from 2022, key metrics, and a glimpse into the year ahead.

1. Delivering a real-time data cloud

Data is THE most valuable asset today, driving intelligent decisions and stronger customer engagement. It’s not enough to deliver results in quarters or years – we have to drive outcomes in days and weeks. Only real-time data powers the speed and scale required for enterprises to move markets.

The Real-Time Data Cloud brings together operational “data at rest” and streaming “data in motion” in a cloud-native architecture. And we’ve been working on delivering just that:

• Astra DB: Large enterprises (e.g. Priceline, ESL Gaming, Albertsons) and cloud-native startups (e.g. VerSe, Temporal, SupPlant) are loving Astra DB. It’s helping solve for complexity while getting to market FAST at 50% of the cost!
• Astra Streaming: We GA’d our best-of-breed streaming and messaging platform, built on Pulsar – with CDC for Astra DB. We now deliver an open stack that unifies all aspects of real-time data: both at rest and in motion.
• Stargate v2: Our award-winning API gateway for developer agility. v2 puts Cassandra at the forefront of the driverless revolution in cloud-native and real-time databases.
• K8ssandra: Cassandra + Kubernetes = PB&J ;) The new K8ssandra Operator makes deploying real-time applications with high availability across multiple regions easier.

2. The best database in the world

We continued to partner with the Cassandra community, hosting AWESOME workshops in nine cities across the globe. And we collaborated on the release of 4.1, which introduced new plug-in features like storage, network encryption, and guardrails. Plus, we helped secure over 220 talks for the upcoming Cassandra Summit 2023!

Not only does 4.1 move Cassandra toward being more cloud-native, but it sets the stage for an exciting future – 5.0 is already in the works and will feature full ACID transactions. Many of the world’s largest enterprises and high-growth startups are betting their future on Cassandra – and it’s paying off.

3. Driving business outcomes with Astra DB

DataStax customers are kicking butt. Stories like these remind me of why we are here: to deliver products that developers love and that change the trajectory of the enterprises they work for. Here are a few great examples:

• VerSe trusts Astra DB to run and scale mission-critical Josh app – India’s fastest growing short video app with 150 million users and 250 billion hits a day.
• Alpha Ori, a maritime IoT platform, runs 864 million data points through Astra DB every day leading to a  >$5M savings in fuel and maintenance costs, and a 10X reduction in operational costs. 
• Priceline uses Astra DB to capture millions of travel searches across partner sites to deliver real-time, personalized customer recommendations.

4. Momentum by the numbers

• 600+ enterprises and 2,100+ developers partnering with DataStax
• ~300% Astra DB growth
• Surpassed $200M in ARR
• ~120% net dollar expansion and >90% gross dollar retention
• $115 million funding round led by Goldman
• 130 events attended (including sponsorships at AWS re:Invent, Gartner Data and Analytics & KubeCon) and 40 developer workshops hosted
• 1 new global HQ office designed for distributed work 
• 10+ Comparably Awards, including Best Place to Work in the Bay Area

Looking ahead

We see a HUGE opportunity for our customers and users to activate all their real-time data in the cloud. At DataStax, our promise is to help you build fast and scale without limits. We provide the skills and tools you need to create awesome apps, while simplifying your real-time development and operations – at 50% of the cost of our competitors. And we’re just getting started.

Can’t wait to keep building the future with all of you.