DataStax plans to take its key-value store and add graph capabilities with the release later this year of DataStax Enterprise Graph.

On Feb. 3, DataStax snatched up the maker of the TitanDB graph database, Aurelius. The move might have been somewhat suspicious at the time, as DataStax had been focusing all of its corporate energy on building out enterprise offerings around Apache Cassandra, a key-value store NoSQL database with no existing graph capabilities.

But Martin Van Ryswyk, executive vice president of engineering at DataStax, said that the acquisition came from customer demands. “We’re moving into a multi-model era now, where we will not just be able to store wide-column data, but we also have a time-series mode, classic CQL [Cassandra Query Language] for…wide columns,” he said.

“DataStax Enterprise Graph will be a world-class, highly scalable graph database with support for hundreds of billions of nodes and edges. The folks at Aurelius are really smart guys who’ve solved hard problems with distributed graph. It’s one thing to put a graph in memory and traverse it, but we have customers who are too big for one box. They need a graph solution that scales horizontally. Thirty customers came specifically to us and said ‘We need graph,’ we think TitanDB is the best, we want you to make it better.”

When DataStax contacted Aurelius, its customers had been asking for the same thing: a combination of the two teams. Van Ryswyk did not have a date yet for the release of DataStax Enterprise Graph, but he did say it would be done in a few months, rather than a number of years or weeks.