DataStax faced layoffs in December after leadership change - Business Insider

, faced a major round of layoffs right before Christmas, and shortly after a leadership shakeup that saw the arrival of a new CEO.

Somewhere between 60 to 100 people were laid off in mid-December, three sources close to the company estimated. According to Pitchbook,has about 500 employees. The professional services and customer success team were hit the hardest by the layoffs, sources said, and employees in the graph database, solutions engineering and sales teams were also impacted.

DataStax builds software using Apache Cassandra, a popular open source database that was originally started at Facebook. Internally, some DataStax employees believe the company was too slow to offer versions of its software that were optimized to run on cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure, and that it was struggling to compete with those tech titans, who offer their own database products, four sources said.

The layoffs were driven from a change in direction under new CEO Chet Kapoor, who joined in October, to focus more on the company's cloud offerings, a source said. A key part of Kapoor's strategy is to build the company's appeal to developers and generate a loyal community of users as a bulwark against competitors, three sources said.A new threat from Amazonand changes in the past year, including another major round of layoffs.

"This has been a time of tough decisions and we have done everything we can to transition these valued people with dignity and compassion," DataStax's former CEO Billy Bosworth and cofounder Jonathan Ellis wrote in

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