o_animatedPortland-based Orchestrate (orchestrate.io) rolls out its commercial NoSQL offering today, claiming to significantly decrease the time, cost and complexity of putting cloud-based data to work.

I took the chance to speak with co-founder and CEO (and former Basho co-founder) Antony Falco, to learn more about the company and the problems it’s seeking to address. Our chat ended up becoming quite a wide-ranging discussion of the world of databases, and it’s embedded here as a podcast.

The Orchestrate team suggests that a ‘typical’ web application today can use as many as five different databases to store and process  diverse data types, or to interact with multiple sensors and other forms of data input. Orchestrate sets out to simplify that complexity, by layering a common and developer-friendly RESTful API on top of the underlying database technologies. Antony discusses some of the ways in which Orchestrate seeks to reduce complexity without abstracting away the power of the underlying tools.

Orchestrate’s solution currently runs in Amazon’s US cloud infrastructure, with other clouds and other geographies being actively explored. Antony notes during our call that the company has seen a great deal of interest from beyond the United States, particularly from Europe.

Antony Falco talks about Orchestrate.io and the database industry [ 52:25 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download