Today at Couchbase, we tread a new path by carving out a new category of database: the Engagement Database.

What is an Engagement Database, you ask me – a guy steeped in the technology side of the business? It’s something that addresses a need we discovered when speaking with our customers over the past year. We asked them, “What kind of applications are you building?” It became obvious that just being “NoSQL” didn’t address the challenges our customers were facing.

The applications our customers are focused on, as part of their organization’s’ overall digital innovation initiatives, really comes down to enhancing the customer experience. With consumers’ diminishing attention spans and increasing fickleness when it comes to final purchase decisions, customer experience is a fierce battleground on which today’s businesses are fighting.

With more and more businesses seeing customer experience equating to competitive advantage, new technologies continue to evolve to unleash data’s potential and create those amazing experiences. However, it’s a simple fact that databases – from transactional databases to the majority of NoSQL solutions – have not been optimized to support and nurture the interactions customers desire. And scale only makes the problem worse.

So far, attempts to solve this problem have led to organizations using a variety of different databases for specific use cases – leading to a difficult-to-manage ‘database sprawl.’ The solution is a comprehensive ‘engagement database,’ or one that allows enterprises to strategically and expeditiously serve up data when designing customer interactions and experiences – especially when they need to perform at scale across all channels and devices. This is the Couchbase Data Platform.

The Couchbase Data Platform was designed to harness the full potential of dynamic data, at any scale, across any channel or device. Built on the most powerful NoSQL technology, the Couchbase Data Platform – as the industry’s first Engagement Database – makes it simple to continually reinvent the customer experience. No other database provides the capabilities that are required to create these experiences from a single platform.

Today we also unveiled innovation behind the industry’s first Engagement Database: the latest Beta release of Couchbase Server 5.0 and preview of Couchbase Mobile 2.0, both part of the Couchbase Data Platform.  The enhanced product suite provides improved developer agility, query performance, and easier cluster management, all of which enable enterprises to build amazing customer engagement applications. Finally, the jewel in the crown is the fully integrated full text search capability–not just for server deployments in the cloud, but also for mobile devices on the edge. To summarize, key enhancements include:

Couchbase Server 5.0 Beta

  • Richer customer experiences with built-in full text search with independent scaling all in the same Couchbase cluster  
  • More responsive applications and efficient data management, with in-memory data sets (no disk needed) including support for query, indexing and high availability replication for in-memory data.
  • Simpler application development that leverages enhanced N1QL query monitoring and debugging, and technology leading adaptive indexing, and built-in multi data center programmability.  
  • Enhanced security options, including fine-grained role based access control (RBAC) support for users and applications.
  • More available applications, from fast node failover in seconds and automatic index replication.
  • Strong ecosystem improvements for ETL, and for public and hybrid cloud solutions

Couchbase Mobile 2.0 Preview

  • Richer customer experiences by providing built-in full text search for mobile applications.
  • Simplified application development with support for N1QL-like API, as well as a new API that provides built-in domain data modeling support
  • Agile development of collaborative, multi-user apps with automatic conflict management on the edge.
  • Faster apps with delta synchronization for more efficient data management from the edge to the cloud

We are very excited to share this news in front of hundreds of customers and partners at Couchbase Connect in New York this week. Stay tuned as we share additional feedback and reaction from attendees and industry pundits next week.

Author

Posted by Ravi Mayuram, CTO and SVP, Products & Engineering

As Senior Vice President of Engineering and CTO, Ravi Mayuram is responsible for product development and delivery delivery of the Couchbase Data Platform, which includes Couchbase Server and Couchbase Mobile. He came to Couchbase from Oracle, where he served as senior director of engineering and led innovation in the areas of recommender systems and social graph, search and analytics, and lightweight client frameworks. Also while at Oracle, Ravi was responsible for kickstarting the cloud collaboration platform. Previously in his career, Ravi has held senior technical and management positions at BEA, Siebel, Informix and HP in addition to couple of startups including BroadBand Office, a Kleiner Perkins funded venture. Ravi holds a Master of Science degree in Mathematics from University of Delhi.

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