Couchbase Goes Public: Making Tomorrow Better Than Today

Today Couchbase has entered its next chapter as a publicly traded company as we officially began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “BASE.”

This is a significant milestone for our company – one that reflects Team Couchbase’s hard work, dedication to serving our customers and consistent track record of success. It’s also a positive reflection of the bright future we have ahead of us as we move forward in our mission to empower enterprises to develop, deploy and maintain their most mission-critical applications by delivering a high-performance, flexible and scalable modern database.

To all of our employees, customers, partners and supporters: thank you. I’d like to take a moment to recognize what got us to this point: our differentiated platform, the trust that our customers place in us and our world-class team and culture.

Where We Started

Couchbase was built to enable and run the core applications that enterprises depend on to run their business.

When Steve Yen and the founding team started Couchbase, they chose to focus on the hardest part of the technology stack – the database. Their goal was to build a better, more agile, more flexible, high-performance database. Attacking hard problems runs deep in our roots as the founding team had to attack some of the most difficult computer science problems in the industry to build the Couchbase platform.

Couchbase was originally based on an open source project and data protocol called Memcached that allowed users to keep their data outside of their legacy relational database systems and access their data at super high-performance speeds in a flexible way. The team also adopted a data format called JSON, which was growing very rapidly in popularity at the time. They took JSON, melded it with the SQL query language and the foundation of today’s modern Couchbase database was born.

In addition to specifically architecting a differentiated platform from day one, it was also important to build a company that serves customers the way we would want to be served. That’s why we built in customer obsession as part of our core DNA from the beginning. Our platform powers mission-critical applications, and we understand the demanding nature of the enterprise. We are always there for our customers when they need us. After all, we are only as successful as our customers.

The Time is Now

There is an urgent need for database platforms that support both sides of digital transformation – both developing and deploying new applications, and also modernizing and upgrading existing ones.

Legacy database technologies were not designed to support modern and highly interactive applications. We believe the industry has now met the limits for which legacy databases were designed. For these reasons, the time is now for organizations to adopt a modern database for mission-critical applications.

Couchbase is well positioned for this massive transformation due to several market catalysts. First, enterprises can no longer wait on digital transformation. Next, the continued growth in data volume and variety, and the further adoption of cloud, mobile and edge computing in applications are happening now. And finally, personalized customer experiences demand high-performing, distributed applications that require scalable and reliable performance.

All of this has led us to this exciting moment. We have a strong customer base of over 500 enterprises, and proudly count over 30% of the Fortune 100 as our customers.

Couchbase was designed for the requirements of enterprises who need the highest performance, reliability, scalability and agility in a single platform. Customers benefit from the Couchbase platform in the following ways:

• • A single unified platform eliminates the need for point solutions so they no longer have to manage separate technologies and independent data models.
  • Our unique architecture is built for uncompromised performance at massive scale. We’re talking tens of millions of operations per second with response times measured in microseconds.
  • We deliver the developer agility they desire at scale by putting the power and control of the data directly in the hands of the developer.
  • No one has to be retrained like they would for another NoSQL database, leading to a more efficient use of resources. We enable existing teams who have been working with SQL for years to easily transition to Couchbase from their legacy relational databases.
  • We’ve built capabilities to enable ease of operations at scale, meeting the core requirements of enterprises such as availability, automation, management, and security.
  • Couchbase runs wherever the customer wants, as a multi-cloud to edge distributed database that can be deployed on any combination of multiple public clouds, private clouds, virtual machines, containers and bare metal servers and right out to the edge.

Doing It The Couchbase Way

The foundation of everything we do at Couchbase is our world-class team and our culture. We believe that we employ the best talent in the industry and enable our employees to do the best and most fulfilling work within a culture we believe in and care about deeply.

Our values underpin everything we do:

• • Be Valued…
    • Be a good human, always
    • Act with uncompromising integrity, period
    • Serve your family, as defined by you
  • And Create Value…
    • Attack hard problems, driven by customer outcomes
    • Play to win, together
    • Make tomorrow better than today, start now

We are building Couchbase for the long term and have ambitious goals for our platform and for our company. And I invite you to join us: we’re hiring!

Without question, an initial public offering (IPO) is a milestone for a business. But it is just one more step on our journey to make tomorrow better, by building the leading modern database for enterprise applications, all while staying true to our values.

Again, a big thank you to our employees, customers, partners and supporters for taking this journey with us. Great things are ahead!

Matt