Today we announced another strategic customer relationship.  This one is with NTT Docomo, the largest mobile service provider in Japan. It’s always nice to announce big customer relationships, but sometimes it’s not obvious to the wider Couchbase community what its importance is to them.  I think these relationships are a crucial ingredient to building great products, and in turn the entire community benefits.

For example, we started working with our first strategic customer before our first product was even released. Zynga, the largest social gaming company in the world, started working with us in early 2010. As you would expect, they are a very demanding customer. Their particular focus was a database with very high-performance, low and predictable latency, and easy scalability to support the rapid growth of game users. They made a big early commitment to Couchbase products and, like all good strategic customers, drove our team very hard to provide the feature set and production stability they needed to deploy our products broadly. The kind of intense relationship we enjoy with Zynga provides tremendous focus to our development team and greatly increases the probability we are delivering the right kinds of solutions for solving real-world problems. I think our relationship with Zynga is a key reason Couchbase is today a leader in performance, scalability, monitoring and alerting, and production readiness.

Over the past 18 months, the NoSQL landscape has changed dramatically. In addition to the Big Data, Big Users, and Cloud Computing trends that have driven the NoSQL industry to date, we think the transition to Mobile Computing will have an equally dramatic impact on data management. NTT Docomo also recognizes the shifting landscape. Like us, they believe that a NoSQL database that is native to mobile devices and handles real-time machine-to-machine (M2M) and machine-to-cloud synchronization is crucial for a growing number of use cases. Like Zynga, they made a big early commitment to Couchbase and are driving our team hard to deliver great NoSQL- and mobile-based solutions that sync with the cloud. There is no doubt in my mind that the wider community of mobile application developers will derive great benefit as a result of our work with NTT Docomo.

The rapid evolution of the NoSQL industry can make it difficult to stay focused on solving the most important problems and delivering robust, production-ready products. We feel very fortunate to have a growing list of deep, strategic customer relationships to guide us and help us deliver great products.

Author

Posted by Bob Wiederhold

Bob served as President and CEO of Couchbase from 2010 to 2017. Until an acquisition by IBM in 2008, Bob served as chairman, CEO, and president of Transitive Corporation, the worldwide leader in cross-platform virtualization with over 20 million users. Previously, he was president and CEO of Tality Corporation, the worldwide leader in electronic design services, whose revenues and size grew to almost $200 million and had 1,500 worldwide employees. Bob held several executive general management positions at Cadence Design Systems, Inc., an electronic design automation company, which he joined in 1985 as an early stage start-up and helped to grow to more than $1.5 billion during his 13 years at the company. Bob also headed High Level Design Systems, a successful electronic design automation start-up that was acquired by Cadence in 1996.

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One Comment

  1. Guest November 19, 2011 at 10:22 am

    Well, interesting post,
    thanks!

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