Case Study: Nuance Communications achieves scalable, multi‑master NoSQL notifications and reduced Oracle reliance with Couchbase

Nuance Communications - Customer Case Study

Nuance Communications’ Varolii unit faced scaling and operational challenges after a decade on a monolithic Oracle stack. In 2013 Varolii tried MongoDB for its automated enterprise notifications product but ran into bidirectional replication and multi-datacenter issues when expanding. The team identified must-haves—multi-master replication, horizontal scaling, open source and VM support—and evaluated Cassandra and Couchbase to replace their relational footprint.

Varolii chose Couchbase for its ease of use, combined document and key-value model, and simpler querying, and integrated it into their Varolii solution with Hadoop to bridge SQL analytics and unstructured data. The move has significantly reduced their relational dependency, improved scalability and manageability, and allowed the company to continue shifting most activities to NoSQL.

Nuance Communications

Tom Coates

Senior Principal Architect