How the Decade of Data Makes Digital Economics Even Better

By Bryan Kirschner, Vice President, Strategy at DataStax

With today’s talk of inflation, it’s worth taking a moment to acknowledge the relentlessly favorable economics of our industry. Since well before my father was programming mainframes and I was learning to code on a Commodore 64, we in tech have benefited from continuously improving price-performance.

Lately, DataStax (my employer) has done its part by cutting the cost of write requests to Astra DB (our Apache Cassandra database-as-a-service) by 50%.

Getting “more for less” is always nice, but it’s important to fully appreciate how and why moves like this in the digital ecosystem can be strategically important to your organization in ways that (for example) a BOGO deal on a physical or consumable good simply is not.

Done right, data-driven digital interactions create a virtuous cycle. Winning more digital interactions generates more data that can be fed back into new and better digital interactions. And as the scope (variety) and scale (volume) of a data estate grow, more becomes possible, such as smarter ML or new and valuable mash-ups of different data sources.

This applies to your business–and to ours as well.

Increased scope and scale of usage of Astra DB by our customers enables us to generate more intelligence about how to optimize resource consumption. More volume enables us to negotiate better discounts with cloud providers. And data generated by thousands of use cases gives us insight into how to tune or enhance functionality based on real-world use.

Because of the digital virtuous cycle, we know in our bones that returning value to our customers is far more powerful in the long run than dropping a few more dollars in our pocket. Here’s why.

When our customers can count on us to control storage costs and evolve their horizontal toolset, they gain a competitive edge.

That’s because the work of every engineer that you have focused on serving your customers drives the virtuous cycle of not only the value created by an interaction, but also the knock-on value of the data generated.

On the other hand, if you commit your engineers to reducing storage costs or creating horizontal infrastructure rather than to winning more interactions with customers, there are no network effects. You might drop a few more dollars in your pocket, but you’d be missing out on increasing the value of your data estate.

And how quickly and fully you realize its potential value is the key to your competitiveness.

Moving fast, focusing on your core, and not reinventing the wheel are all outstanding ways to accomplish this.

For companies like ours in the open-source SaaS ecosystem, that means driving the price-performance of a best-of-breed open-source technology, available on demand from public cloud providers (who are themselves driving the price-performance of commodity infrastructure).

For companies like yours, more so than ever before, the economics of our industry are aligned toward enabling you to innovate and grow. It’s a privilege to be able to reflect on what lies ahead in this “decade of data” after witnessing 50 years of Moore’s Law and conclude: “Maybe we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Learn more about us here.

About Bryan Kirschner:

Bryan is Vice President, Strategy at DataStax. For more than 20 years he has helped large organizations build and execute strategy when they are seeking new ways forward and a future materially different from their past. He specializes in removing fear, uncertainty, and doubt from strategic decision-making through empirical data and market sensing.

In 2006, he was named the first Director of Open Source Strategy in the history of Microsoft. The company’s reorientation toward constructive engagement with Open Source developers, users and buyers drove significant advances in business results, engagement with customers, and standing with regulators. Later he was instrumental in a task force that resulted in then-CEO Steve Ballmer’s 2010 landmark speech declaring that Microsoft was “all in” on cloud computing.

Bryan founded the Apigee Institute in 2013, bringing Apigee customers, world-class experts, and groundbreaking research together to help enterprises accelerate digital transformation. Following the company’s acquisition by Google, he led research and strategy for Google Cloud Developer Relations and DevOps Platform.

A frequent speaker at industry events on digital transformation and platform strategy, he has cultivated strong relationships with leading academic researchers on these topics for over a decade.

He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Yale University and lives in Seattle, Washington.