In 2013, Varolii, a Nuance Communications company, began evaluating backend solutions for its automated notifications product geared toward enterprises. For the previous 10 years, the company deployed an all-Oracle environment, but found that the monolithic platforms were difficult to manage from an engineering perspective. Varolii mobilized MongoDB for a small project which worked for the initial size and scope; however, efforts to expand to a second data center posed challenges with bidirectional replication issues. Upon review, Varolii identified must-have requirements including multi-master database replication, horizontal scaling, open source, and VM support. They evaluated Cassandra and Couchbase which were closely aligned, yet Couchbase outperformed Cassandra in ease of use. Further, Cassandra didn’t provide the document database aspect they wanted to leverage in addition to key-value capability, and querying was also much more involved. Today, Nuance leverages Couchbase in their Varolii solution and uses the Hadoop integration to connect SQL-based analysis to the world of unstructured data.