I used to work for a database company and have been involved in the purchasing side of database support contracts. Professional Services/Consulting is a small r

I used to work for a database company and have been involved in the purchasing side of database support contracts. Professional Services/Consulting is a small revenue line (and TCO component) relative to support licensing. It also has considerably lower margins. Scylla is an upstart... but I would not call them a second tier player. DataStax is already trying and failing [0, 1] to incorporate ideas from Scylla in to their product. Yes, support and SLAs matter. And this round of funding will go a long way toward helping Scylla build out those parts of their business. [0] - https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-10989 https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-10989 [1] - https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-8520 https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/CASSANDRA-8520