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Couchbase swaps CEO for ex-Veritas prez

NoSQL IPO prep?

NoSQL business Couchbase has replaced Bob Wiederhold as its chief executive officer with former Veritas president Matt Cain.

Wiederhold had been CEO since 2010, and will remain at the company as its executive chairman, but will no longer be at the helm as Couchbase makes its long-promised initial public offering.

Mountain View-based Couchbase was founded in 2011 following the merger of Membase and CouchOne, with the intention of building the open-source document-oriented database into the replacement for incumbent technologies such as Oracle.

While its engineering efforts have targeted mobile and IoT applications, as well as allowed core database services to run on different server parts through its Multi-Dimensional Scaling architecture, there is no suggestion as of yet that it will substantially replace Oracle database instances.

In the latest of a number of funding rounds, the company raised $30m in a Series-F last year, bringing its total amount of money raised to $146m. At the time, the departing CEO said: "This funding round will take us to cash flow positive and should be our last round prior to an IPO."

Cain's arrival will raise questions about how well Wiederhold had done in achieving positive cash flow. At Veritas, Cain was president of worldwide field operations, running a 4,200-strong team responsible for sales, customer retention, channels, services and support.

It comes amid much consolidation in the NoSQL space. Dev Ittycheria, CEO of MongoDB, the largest vendor according to db-engines, told The Register that he "definitely think[s] that there's a shake-out happening in the industry" and he and his colleagues were "starting to see some of our NoSQL brethren start to struggle".

For the new CEO's part, Cain said he "welcome[d] the opportunity to build upon Couchbase's fantastic foundation and success, further growing the brand, fostering a dynamic culture committed to delivering exceptional next-generation customer experiences, and building a world-class company."

Wiederhold said: "Our focus on delivering mission-critical, enterprise-class database solutions that allow digital businesses to deliver great customer experiences has allowed us to grow by over 50 per cent in 2016 with even greater growth expected in 2017. I am thrilled to have Matt join the company as CEO to take us through our next phase of growth and excited to work with him to build the next great database company." ®

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