Table of Contents Abstract Introduction The Expanding Digitization of Business The Core of the Internet Enterprise

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2 Table of Contents Abstract... Introduction... Definition... The Expanding Digitization of Business... The Core of the Internet Enterprise... Requirements leading to radical change... Success Factors for the Internet Enterprise... Global Scaling... Customer-Driven Development Micro Thinking... Rise of the Global Database... Roadmap Toward the Internet Enterprise... How DataStax Helps Power the Internet Enterprise... Conclusion... About DataStax

3 Abstract Businesses can no longer think in terms of traditional versus internet markets. Every company that wants to win today must incorporate valuable lessons learned by Internet Companies, insights applied successfully about how to quickly collect and transform data into information that can be used strategically to grow the business. This paper defines the Internet Enterprise and discusses radical changes in technology DNA that Internet Companies created. Most importantly, it explains why and how all forward-looking companies need to challenge long-held assumptions about how they develop and deliver products and services with an eye toward competitive edge. Introduction The digital world is eating the real world, and along with it, many traditional markets are being violently disrupted. Internet Companies have changed the rules, and the game. Thermostats, farm tractors, shipping, even trips to the grocery store are rapidly changing from simple human interactions into full digital engagements. The underlying key to how Internet Companies have achieved this is found in their digital DNA. At their core, you will find a maniacal focus on data that has led to infrastructures capable of completely changing user engagements and corporate capabilities. Companies that were not born in the data age have infrastructures built on enterprise software designed for a different era. One CIO from a large European bank said: Other banks are not what concerns me. As I think about our future, it is Google, Facebook, and Amazon who keep me up at night. I know what we need to do from a customer standpoint, but now I have to get our enterprise infrastructure up to the task. CIO from a large European bank In short, he wants to take the data DNA from Internet Companies and use it to transform his infrastructure to meet the needs of tomorrow. He wants his bank to become an Internet Enterprise. Definition An Internet Enterprise is a company that infuses the data-driven DNA created by Internet Companies into its enterprise software infrastructure to deliver the power, flexibility, and capabilities required to compete and win in the digital age. Only by shifting from old enterprise architectures can businesses innovate in new ways that will create expanding and differentiated market opportunities in today s marketplace. The Expanding Digitization of Business Internet Companies have changed the rules of customer engagement before our very eyes. Google has gone from a search engine to a hugely diverse organization aimed at changing how we live. If it is up to them, we will literally see the world through their data filter in the form of wearable devices like Google Glass. Amazon began by selling books online and today it is hard to track all the markets in which they play. Everything is up for grabs, from delivering packages with drone technology to moving into consumers kitchens with a new way to shop for groceries; there is literally no market or business not affected by the Internet Enterprise business model. Upstarts like Square, Uber, and AirBnb are radically changing ( disrupting is too weak a word) longstanding service industries by bringing data to bear. Making payments, finding a cab in a crowded city, or renting a room in your home look nothing like they did just a few years ago. 3

4 The Core of the Internet Enterprise Businesses can no longer think in terms of traditional versus internet markets. Today you either become an Internet Enterprise or you face extinction. The key to success in the Internet Enterprise is mastering the process of quickly collecting and transforming data into information that can be used strategically to grow your business. The Internet Enterprise makes data capabilities the top priority, which then allows your business to innovate and move quickly. Making data a central focus requires rethinking how the heart of your technology infrastructure the database foundation is designed and deployed. For the last 25 years, the enterprise software infrastructure has been dominated at the database layer by relational database (RDBMS) technologies. The first crack in the traditional market came with the NoSQL concept that freed developers from the rigid rules of relational design. That was an important aspect of the new world, but was far from the whole story. Once systems needed to scale, attention turned to core architectures. More than anywhere else, the shift to data-centric thinking and the Internet Enterprise business model has brought massive disruption to how databases are deployed across the enterprise. Requirements leading to radical change Two primary requirements led to this radical architectural change: Because their architectures are not designed specifically for the requirements of the purely digital age, RDBMS s are not sufficient to handle the database backbone for a true Internet Enterprise. Attempting to make them fit results in clunky, expensive, and operationally-untenable failures. A chief architect for a logistics company stated: We are at peak during the holiday season, but our relational database architecture requires a team of 20 people working full-time for 11 months just to prepare. We cannot grow and change the way we do business with that kind of complexity in our systems, not to mention the prohibitive cost. - Chief Architect for a logistics company The industry spent a lot of time and money trying to make machines more robust so that the relational database would not fail. Internet Companies took a different approach. They assumed that machines would fail and rather than create a better machine, they simply designed their databases around that failure. The trick was to create this robustness while simultaneously delivering extreme performance for massive write and read activity. Needless to say, this was no small feat. Distributing databases is not terribly difficult for read-mostly workloads or when you are dealing with just a few machines. But, building a write-anywhere/readanywhere database that is truly fully distributed and can handle constant failure is another matter entirely. That is exactly what the Internet Companies did. 1. The need to distribute data everywhere. 2. The need to handle expected and repetitious machine and network failure. Once Internet Companies realized these requirements, there were immediate consequences for the relational database world. Words like replication, scale, throughput, and high availability were all taken to an entirely new level. 4

5 The following chart summarizes radical changes to technology DNA that arose from the new requirements. Radical Changes to Technology DNA Success Metrics Application Scale Traditional Companies Revenue, profit, CapEx and OpEx defined success. Incremental: the audience for applications grew from group to department to the entire company (and eventually beyond the company), with subtle changes evident in each iteration. Internet Companies Customer retention and engagement becomes the top (and often only) priority. Global: the potential audience for an application is the entire planet, a reality that shatters sacrosanct systems characteristics. Technical systems must be voluminous and distributed to match the audience. Monetization Path Traditional economy: income came from the sale of the primary product or service. Data-driven economy: income comes from data. Customers receive the primary product for free while behavioral data is the actual currency. Income paths include datadriven ads, premium services, and volume access. Development Approach Months to years were spent developing a product that the company hoped consumers would embrace. As customer experience become the most important success metric, consumers become intimate contributors to product design. The product enjoys rapid delivery tested in small pieces, with the mantra being learn fast and fail fast. Decision Making Macro thinking: large decisions were implemented infrequently. Feedback cycles were long and often inaccurate, leading to high decision risk. Micro thinking: small decisions are implemented continuously. Information derived from small optimizations is astoundingly accurate, greatly reducing the risk of each micro decision. The result: a highly optimized, highly efficient way of improving products and services. Figure 1 - Radical changes to technology DNA 5

6 Success Factors for the Internet Enterprise Once you shift to a new mindset centered on data, it opens new possibilities and paradigms for your business. Successful Internet Companies excel at the following processes that give them key advantages over their competition. Global Scaling The age into which Internet Companies were born saw everything on a global scale from day one. Their new audience was potentially the entire planet. A change of that magnitude shattered sacrosanct characteristics of systems such as off-peak and downtime hours. If their customers were going to be voluminous and distributed, then their technical systems could afford to be nothing less. A recent third-party information technology survey indicated that 9% of surveyed IT organizations purchased a non-relational database technology because they needed linear scale with minimal complexity. (Source: TechValidate. TVID: 093-F43-EE9) Customer-Driven Development Internet Companies made the consumer an intimate part of the product design process. Now that they had better data, gone were the months-to-years of development leading to a big product unveiling. Changing to a rapid product delivery schedule that could be tested in small, manageable pieces was only possible if the underlying database could handle it. Micro Thinking Internet Companies completely reversed that paradigm by making micro decisions continuously. Because they have such tight integration with their customers data, the information they can quickly derive from small optimizations is astoundingly accurate. This drives down the risk of each micro decision to nearly zero, which is why they can afford to make them continuously. The result is a highly optimized, highly efficient method to increment your products and services. A side benefit to this way of thinking is a completely engaged technology team that sees the results of their labor almost immediately. Rise of the Global Database Internet Companies started dealing with a high volume of data from the outset and much of it (for example, log files) did not fit well into existing relational systems. Distributing the analysis of the data was the first step, with cost as the main driver. Traditional analytical databases were very expensive; with data increasing by orders of magnitude, it was no longer practical to deploy very expensive, high-end data warehouses. Distributing the load on commodity hardware was the only way the cost equation made sense. Distributing transactional databases (those that run online applications) presented deeper technical challenges, but meeting the new demands of the digital world simply would not work at scale. The nature of the Internet Enterprise requires an always-on mentality radically different than anything previously experienced. This meant that Internet Companies had to meet never-before-seen performance demands while at the same time shifting their mindset from disaster recovery to disaster avoidance. The solution was to create a truly distributed, read-anywhere/write-anywhere database whose architecture allows you to push data geographically close to endpoints, which is critical for performance. At the same time, once you are free from a single data center, catastrophic disconnections from machines, or even entire regions and countries, will not have any perceived impact on the transactional database backbone.

7 Roadmap Toward the Internet Enterprise To transform your database infrastructure into something that can support the Internet Enterprise business model, you will need to smartly think through some key aspects. First, you need to address the core of your data generation and interaction systems, which is the realm of the transactional database. Fortunately, this does not have to be an all-or-nothing proposition as it relates to your relational database environment. You can rewrite pieces of existing applications or entirely new applications on the new distributed backbone. This approach has many benefits, but also one important drawback that needs consideration. The transactional feedback loop involves the collection of data, followed by immediate analysis or searching that drives a behavioral change in the moment. For example, take an airline reservation system - transactional behavior occurs when someone logs into the system, enters travel dates, times, and preferences, and then executes a search for tickets. To optimize pricing and availability, many variables come into play. What are all the possible connections? Is it a peak travel time or season? What is the weather forecast for the cities involved? What is the historic availability? These questions must be answered between the time the customer issues the search and the time the flight options are displayed. That feedback loop must be immediate. Whenever you move to a new distributed system, you must consider the complexity involved at scale. Managing a database on 10 or fewer nodes in a single data center (whether cloud or on-premise does not matter) is a great way to get started, but a poor way to plan for success. When it comes to delivering a true distributed backbone to your organization, you must think on a global scale in terms of data distribution and throughput. The system cannot be so complicated at scale that it cripples operations and development teams. Next, you must consider the demands on the transactional data after it is created. Once data exists, there will be myriad questions to be answered from it. Some of those answers will reside in data warehouses where complex questions are asked over very large datasets. The data warehouse scenario is straightforward because it simply involves moving data from your transactional system into the data warehouse for further processing. The more challenging problem is how to create a feedback loop for your transactional systems so that they can change experiences in the moment. 7

8 How DataStax Helps Power the Internet Enterprise To follow the roadmap outlined above, you will need to choose the right distributed database that supports your efforts. Apache Cassandra is the leading open source database management system for mission-critical, distributed transactional applications at scale. DataStax was co-founded in 2010 by the Apache Cassandra chairman with the intent of making Cassandra the backbone for tomorrow s transactional engines. That vision is fully realized through the commercial version of Apache Cassandra called DataStax Enterprise. Support & Training Dev. IDE & Drivers Professional Services Certified, Enterprise-ready Cassandra Management Services Security In-Memory Analytics Search Visual Monitoring Figure 2 - Graphical representation of DataStax Enterprise elements 8

9 DataStax Enterprise focuses on the things that traditional companies need for a successful transition to the new world of distributed transactional databases. Through its productioncertification process, DataStax ensures the delivery of a battle-tested, enterprise-grade database platform ready for Internet Enterprise-scale applications. DataStax stands behind that assurance with alwaysavailable, global support teams who are the authors and experts behind Cassandra. In addition, DataStax knows that Internet Enterprises need advanced tools and functionality for large-scale, global production applications. Because of this, DataStax Enterprise delivers tooling and advanced functionality designed to keep complexity and operational management costs incredibly low. That translates to a very low cost of ownership, and more importantly, to agile, fast development cycles for application teams. DataStax Enterprise also delivers transactional feedback loop capabilities with Search and Analytics processing fully integrated into the same system right out of the box. This built-in integration shrinks to near zero the feedback loop from data to actionable information, all without impacting the performance of the core transactional system. Because DataStax Enterprise is powered by Cassandra, your Internet Enterprise applications experience the following benefits: Always-On. Gone are manual failover configurations, and instead, now you now have an automated continuously available database management system with no single point of failure that keeps your applications always available and serving customers. Extreme Performance. In the RDBMS world poor performance was annoying, but today with the competition just a click away, slow service produces the same effect as a down system. With DataStax Enterprise, you can future-proof both the scale and performance capabilities of your applications, confident that your systems can handle billions and trillions of transactions per day with response times in the low millisecond range. Location Independence. It makes no difference whether the data is distributed across several racks in a data center, across multiple on-premise data centers located around the world, or in some combination of public cloud providers and private data centers. Development and operations teams no longer need to be constrained with the complexity of primary machines or data centers. It s elegant and simple to managing DataStax Enterprise in any data center configuration, including cloud data centers. Customized Geo Data Distribution. Fully distributing your data throughout many data centers and regions is no problem, but there may be times when doing so is not desirable. Perhaps a particular subset of data cannot leave a region or country, while other data from the same system needs to propagate everywhere. This is easily handled with DataStax Enterprise by configuring your data model (the way data is written to the database) according to whatever replication rules govern that data set. Predictable, Manageable Scale. Successful applications are going to grow, and grow fast. DataStax Enterprise scales in a linear, predictable fashion making it easy to accommodate growth from an operations and/or planning perspective. 9

10 Why Large Enterprise Customers Moved to Datastax Before you chose DataStax Enterprise, why were you looking for a new database technology? 70% 0% 57% 43% 43% 27% 20% 7% 13% Source: Survey of 30 Large Enterprise users of DataStax Enterprise Figure 3 - Survey results of large enterprise users of DataStax Enterprise 10

11 Conclusion In summary, a distributed database management system (DDBMS) backbone is key to success in the Internet Enterprise. Such a database infrastructure will pay big dividends in myriad ways as development and operations teams are freed from the limitations of the RDBMS paradigm for transactional systems. The key is to get started with an eye toward growth and manageability. When modern IT teams provide their business with a platform to meet the challenges created by today s digital world, their companies will have achieved a major step toward becoming an Internet Enterprise that will compete on the stage of tomorrow. About DataStax DataStax delivers Cassandra as the database of choice for today s most innovative businesses. It is built to be agile, always-on and predictably scalable for workloads of any size -- all at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems. DataStax has more than 500 customers in 45 countries including progressive organizations like Netflix, ebay, Intuit and Nest and spans verticals including retail, financial services, media, telecommunications and government. Based in Santa Clara, California, DataStax is backed by industryleading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Meritech Capital, and Crosslink Capital. For more information, visit DataStax.com or follow 11