A Shortcut to Cure Big Data Headaches

Two years ago, Hothead Games was drowning. On March 1, 2012, Apple promoted the company’s mobile game Big Win Soccer on its App Store—great news, except that Hothead wasn’t prepared for the massive influx of visitors that followed. Within six hours, traffic to Hothead’s servers spiked a hundredfold, says co-founder and director of technology Joel DeYoung. The company’s software couldn’t manage all the data from the crush of users quickly enough. Players experienced sustained game delays. As Hothead’s user base ballooned from the tens of thousands into the millions, “it was like we were in the kiddie end of the pool, and we were thrown into the deep end,” DeYoung says. Later that month his company managed to stabilize its service by outsourcing its database creation and storage. It hired Cloudant, a startup founded in 2008, which is using cloud technology to take a bite out of the $36 billion database market by managing enormous amounts of user information on behalf of other businesses.

It’s not just overnight successes such as Hothead that need help. Companies of all kinds are turning to on-demand database services in lieu of paying for more staffers and equipment to deal with the data they collect. In addition to PCs, smartphones, and tablets, a host of other devices—smart cars, thermometers, even traffic lights—constantly scoops up data about the people who use them. As Cloudant Chief Executive Officer Derek Schoettle says, “The mantra now is collect it and save it, because you don’t know how you may want to use it.”