IBM targets AI application growth with DataStax buy

Looking to bolster its AI data handling and storage capabilities, IBM said it had entered an agreement to buy open-source database developer DataStax for an undisclosed amount.

DataStax is known for Apache Cassandra, the firm’s open-source NoSQL database project featured in its AstraDB, DataStax Enterprise software portfolio. 

According to DataStax, Cassandra is a high-availability system that lets server clusters continue operating in the event of failure—an important consideration for generative AI and AI analytics development, IBM stated.

In particular, IBM said DataStax’s technology would be built into its watsonx portfolio of genAI products to help manage the vast amounts of unstructured data used in genAI application development.

Thousands of organizations including FedEx, Capital One, The Home Depot, and Verizon use Apache Cassandra. It offers scalability, availability, fault tolerance, high performance, and multi-data-center and hybrid cloud support, IBM stated. “Increasingly, Apache Cassandra users are leveraging the database for AI workloads. In this context, DataStax brings together a mature datastore with vector and graphRAG capabilities—a critical combination for harnessing unstructured data for [genAI],” IBM stated.

“Businesses cannot realize the full potential of [genAI] without the right infrastructure—open-source tools and technologies that empower developers, harness unstructured data, and provide a strong foundation for AI applications,” Dinesh Nirmal, senior vice president of IBM Software, said in a statement.

The system supports Langflow a low-code, open-source app builder for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and multi-agent AI applications, IBM stated. “It is Python-based and model-, API-, and database-agnostic. Langflow adds additional flexible middleware capabilities to IBM watsonx.ai, the integrated, end-to-end AI development studio for building [genAI] applications,” IBM stated.    

DataStax competes with a variety of large database vendors including Oracle and MongoDB and has development partnerships with core cloud vendors such as Amazon, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. The company recently teamed with Nvidia to integrate its technology with the Nvidia AI Enterprise platform.

“The acquisition of a prominent NoSQL database vendor focused on unstructured data management should nicely complement IBM’s long-time Db2 relational database offering,” equity research firm William Blair wrote in a report about the acquisition. “With respect to genAI, the deal should broaden the core capabilities of IBM’s Watsonx genAI platform, especially around managing unstructured and semi-structured data and simplifying an enterprise’s ability to develop cutting-edge AI applications around that data.”

The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2025.