Couchbase’s Wayne Carter on Why Every Enterprise Should Be Looking to Leverage Database Technologies

Based in Santa Clara, Calif., Couchbase is NoSQL database and data management software maker best known for creating the world’s first “Engagement Database.” Known as the Couchbase Data Platform, the distributed, multi-cloud, and mobile NoSQL document database is based on a memory-first, async everywhere architecture and powers companies as varied as AT&T, Disney, eBay, and Wells Fargo.

AWS Startups recently interviewed Wayne Carter, Couchbase’s Vice President of Mobile, about the company’s mission, methods, and most successful ideas.

How do you function as a database?

At Couchbase, our mission is to deliver the data platform for revolutionizing digital transformation in the enterprise. We have a distributed database in the cloud that handles availability, performance, all the functional operational and security concerns of managing data in a large, centralized environment, and we use our distributed architecture to accomplish that. And then we have embedded database for delivering those same availability and performance guarantees that we deliver in the cloud, but online/offline.

How else does Couchbase manage data?

Fundamentally this drops into three different categories: functional concerns, the operational concerns, and security concerns of managing data. On the functional side it’s storage and access. From the operational side it’s scalability, availability, performance, and integration. And on the security side it’s about secure data storage, secure data access, secure data transport, and data access control including revocation. So when I say you have access to a piece of data, you can have it and you can look at it, but when I stop, when I say you don’t have access into it anymore, we then unthread that needle and remove it from the areas of the system that you can access both on the cloud and in the edge.

What Couchase ideas are the most successful?

The ones that focus more on the fundamentals and more about doing the evaluation of “should I build this” or “should I go and look for a solution that delivers the needs that I have?”…Those are the ones that are most successful, right? Where we’re seeing some stumbling is [with] It’s Not Built Here syndrome, where we can all build whatever we want; we’re all great engineers, right? It’s only software. Anything one person can build, another person can build. The question is really, is it strategic for you to build that? Or is it somewhere else that you need to be focusing your time? And then you just outsource the concerns, in my case data management, to some other company.

What else should we know about Couchbase?

It’s really fun. Anyone watching this, I would just say go out, see what’s going on in the database space, consider Couchbase. I love what we’re doing here, think it’s great. But it can be really enabling. You can achieve things you could not achieve otherwise. You just can’t. Get in there, really understand it, and see how it applies to you. It’s really important for every enterprise to be looking at how they can leverage digital technologies, specifically database technologies, and being successful in their digital transformations.