IBM announced its intent to buy DataStax, an AI and data solution provider. And DataStax’s technology will enhance IBM’s watsonx portfolio of products accelerating the use of generative AI, helping companies unlock value from vast amounts of unstructured data.
The deal also builds on IBM’s commitment to open-source AI. And DataStax is the creator of AstraDB and DataStax Enterprise, NoSQL and vector database capabilities powered by Apache Cassandra; and Langflow, the open-source tool and community for low-code AI application development.
IBM will continue to support, engage, and innovate with the open-source Apache Cassandra, Langflow, Apache Pulsar, and OpenSearch communities in which DataStax participates. And IBM’s long-standing commitment to open-source AI includes the open-source IBM Granite foundation models and Instruct Lab, a revolutionary approach to advancing true open-source innovation around LLMs.
Businesses struggle to harness valuable, unstructured data from across their business – which is critical for powering generative AI. And without tools to properly ingest and manage this untapped data, costly generative AI projects will fail to deliver their full potential.
IBM is a leader in helping clients scale GenAI and transform their business using enterprise data. The acquisition of DataStax enhances these efforts. Their vector database excels at utilizing unstructured enterprise data and accelerating its time to value, and Langflow offers a graphical, low-code design environment and component orchestration for generative AI apps that facilitates collaboration across diverse skill sets.
1.) AstraDB and DataStax Enterprise offer NoSQL and vector database capabilities powered by Apache Cassandra, enabling production-ready GenAI applications for the enterprise. AstraDB will enhance the existing vector capabilities of IBM watsonx.data, which is IBM’s hybrid open data lakehouse for AI and analytics. Many organizations use Apache Cassandra, including some of the biggest names in software, retail, finance, and e-commerce. Plus, Apache Cassandra offers scalability, availability, fault tolerance, high performance, and multi-data-center and hybrid cloud support. And Apache Cassandra users are leveraging the database for AI workloads. DataStax brings together a mature datastore with vector and graphRAG capabilities – a critical combination for harnessing unstructured data for generative AI
2.) Langflow is a low-code, open-source app builder for RAG and multi-agent AI applications and it is Python-based and model-, API-, and database-agnostic. Langflow brings additional flexible middleware capabilities to IBM watsonx.ai, the integrated, end-to-end AI development studio for building generative AI applications
DataStax’s hundreds of customers include FedEx, Capital One, The Home Depot and Verizon. And DataStax was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA.
The financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. This acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2025, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.
KEY QUOTES:
“Businesses cannot realize the full potential of generative AI without the right infrastructure – open-source tools and technologies that empower developers, harness unstructured data, and provide a strong foundation for AI applications. DataStax possesses deep competency in this area and shares IBM’s relentless commitment to simplifying and scaling generative AI for the enterprise.”
- Dinesh Nirmal, Senior Vice President, IBM Software
“Enterprises want to deliver production AI fast, but are still struggling to unlock the value in their data to power AI applications and agents. DataStax’s products solve this problem, accelerating AI’s promise with the scalability, security, and accuracy developers and enterprises need. We’ve long said that there is no AI without data, and are excited to execute this vision with IBM.”
- Chet Kapoor, Chairman and CEO of DataStax
