Rockset Users Stranded by OpenAI Acquisition: Now What?

In June 2024, Rockset users got some stressful news: OpenAI had purchased the company, and current users of its platform had 90 days to find another solution. Evaluating new solutions, integrating them, and managing data migrations when the entire process is planned is already challenging enough.

But when it’s unplanned like this? When a solution like Rockset is tightly woven into mission-critical applications? It’s chaos and intensely stressful for the teams that must scramble to adapt.

Some will say it’s the cost of doing business. Others will argue that it’s better to use open source solutions, though these can become closed-source, lose their maintainers, or be infeasible for other reasons. Some even argue for the most untenable approach: to go alone, reinvent the wheel, and build it all yourself. But that’s nearly impossible when there’s only 90 days.

Engineers and technical teams must be resilient, agile, and adaptable, like the solutions they build. Still, leaders and managers must also consider the human side of being forced to make a significant, unexpected pivot to another solution.

It’s summer (at least in the northern hemisphere) — the season of family vacations, weddings, get-togethers, barbeques. But now, at least for current Rockset users, there’s a sudden, unexpected change in a different kind of season. It’s not just the temperature going up, but also the pressure.

So, how should a migration like this be handled? Implementing policies, testing, validation, and ensuring the process is secure are all important. But let’s zoom out and look at the bigger picture and consider how to handle migration in a way that supports both your business and your talent.

Be Agile, Not Rushed

Ninety days isn’t much time — but it is enough time to evaluate several solutions and undergo a trial process. Business and engineering leaders need to set up preliminary calls with several solutions and see which ones are worth trying in more depth. In this case, being agile means being flexible and adapting based on the solutions available to your organization. It means giving yourself time to understand the transition process and create a strategy. This ties into the next point — knowing when to hold and when to fold.

Know When To Hold and When To Fold

How well was your prior integration working for you? Was there room for improvement — perhaps new opportunities with another solution? Do you need to keep and migrate all the data into a new solution? In this case, “holding” means trying to keep everything as close as possible to how it was — but that may not be possible. “Folding” doesn’t mean giving up — seeing if the next hand you draw is a better fit.

From a data perspective, if you already have a short retention window or are not regularly querying all of your data, you may only need to migrate some of it. Or you can move most of it to a storage bucket and worry about it later. If so, it’s okay to fold. Meanwhile, if you have mission-critical data, that’s a hold — and something to determine in the trial/POC process.

From a features perspective, Rockset has a unique range of features (and some weaknesses, too). Which of the features are absolute must-haves for your integration? Which are nice-to-haves that you can live without in the short term? And which weren’t essential? For example, Rockset distinguished itself as a rare solution combining OLAP functionality with mutable data. However, many use cases involving real-time analytics and log data don’t require mutability. Immutability is typically preferable for log data.

Which features and data must you hold, and which can you live without?

It’s All About the People

This is where people are important — not just your people but those working for the vendors with solutions you’re considering. You need to understand the feasibility of a solution, get it up and running quickly, and then integrate it into your business. It’s okay to need help. You’ll probably need all the help you can get. The trial/proof of concept process is an opportunity to quickly get up and running, typically at no cost, with support from another organization that profoundly understands how their product works.

If you need to migrate your data, the success team of your next solution should be able to support that. The same applies to setting up different data sources, ensuring that ingested data has the shape you expect, optimizing queries for your use case, and more.

Great people and support are absolute musts for this kind of rapid transition. Of course, work with the people at your current solution as much as possible. For example, Rockset has pledged to support its current customers with the transition.

Don’t Go It Alone

Do you have a team of superstar engineers that can set up an MVP of a real-time analytics database in a few months? Even if you do, resist the temptation to DIY. There’s too much risk involved, at least in the short term. It’s not just about building an MVP — it’s about the optimizations and consistency you need to develop into a viable solution — a polished solution that works as expected. Trying to build a DIY solution in such a compressed time frame is an example of being rushed, not agile.

Most importantly, trying to DIY will likely divert resources from the products you need to build. A DIY solution can be part of a long-term plan but not a surprise 90-day plan.

Open Source Isn’t the Only Answer

After an acquisition like this, one typical response is that open source is the answer. The reasoning is that open source will always remain available, and you won’t have to deal with surprise acquisitions. Open source is often a great solution, and organizations like the Apache Software Foundation are building powerful tools like Flink, Pinot, and Druid that can support real-time analytics use cases.

However, in the short term, putting together an open source solution that fits your use case has some of the same challenges as DIY. Even a robust open source community that is happy to answer your questions differs from a customer success team that’s deeply motivated to integrate the solution for you and win your business. If it were easy to replicate what Rockset does, it wouldn’t have existed in the first place. Customers would use RocksDB instead or some other open source solution. There is a cost with closed source, but the value is added. Specifically, the complex problems around scalability, reliability, and efficiency are already solved for you.

Ninety days is a little time, so beware of rushing into building something. Yes, open source is often a good answer, but be realistic about how much time you’ll need to set up a solution, how many resources it will take, and how much of a diversion it would be from your core business goals to go that route.

One Size Doesn’t Necessarily Fit All

Rockset built a unique product. There’s a reason that OpenAI spent nine figures to acquire it — and why they don’t want their competition to use it. It combines OLAP with other features like a converged index and mutable data.

Finding another solution that’s a very close replacement may be tempting, but this goes back to knowing when to hold and when to fold. You are going to lose some of the hands. Businesses that must leave Rockset (or facing the same issue with another solution) are already facing a loss. They must now unexpectedly spend time, energy, and resources finding new options.

You shouldn’t just evaluate one solution; you may even find that you want to use more than one solution. For example, in the short term, that could mean using a real-time analytics platform that provides powerful real-time analytics functionality and then sending some of the data from that platform to associated tables in another solution for machine learning applications. It could mean combining several closed source solutions, open source, and even some DIY in the long term.

Protect Your Business — and Your Talent

Surprise migrations don’t just threaten your business — they put tremendous pressure on your teams. To navigate this terrain, you need all the talent you can get — from your teams, leaders, and other businesses that have built solutions designed to fit your use case. For Rockset users, it’s a significant loss that they will no longer have access to the talented people and unique solutions that Rockset built. But there are plenty of other solutions out there, and there’s a good chance that there’s one (or even multiple solutions) that can unlock new business use cases for you.