Blog
Case Study
Company
TileDB, a leader in omnimodal data intelligence, provides the TileDB Carrara to manage and analyze all data types—from structured tables to genomics—in a single, governed environment.
Category
Data Infrastructure / Enterprise Software Deployment
Challenge
TileDB needed to align its innovative platform with the complex deployment requirements of its largest enterprise customers, including support for private cloud accounts ("BYOC") and Microsoft Azure.
Result
TileDB successfully met enterprise requirements, unblocking new revenue opportunities on Azure and establishing the foundation for an automated, self-service experience.
TileDB developed the revolutionary Carrara omnimodal data platform, which is uniquely designed for the complex data needs of regulated industries like Healthcare & Life Sciences (HLS). While TileDB's product was a perfect fit for this market, their deployment model needed to evolve to meet the stringent requirements of their largest-scale customers.
These high-value enterprises, including major pharmaceutical and hospital networks, have strict data sovereignty and compliance needs (e.g., HIPAA). Their policies require that platforms like TileDB run inside their own private cloud accounts—a model known as "Bring Your Own Cloud" (BYOC).
This presented a strategic opportunity and a set of new requirements for TileDB:
Expanding Cloud Support
TileDB needed to support BYOC deployments on Microsoft Azure, a mandatory requirement for a large and critical segment of their target market.
Scaling Customer Onboarding
The existing process for provisioning new dedicated instances was manual and engineer-intensive. To support enterprise growth, TileDB needed an automated, self-service experience.
Meeting Compliance at Scale
TileDB needed a programmatic and scalable way to guarantee the strict data residency and performance isolation their HLS customers required for compliance.
The "DIY" Consideration
TileDB's engineering team faced a classic "build vs. buy" decision. According to leading cloud providers and industry reviews, a "DIY" control plane requires a $2M-$4M investment and 12-18 months to build the initial (limited) version. This path also creates significant, ongoing Day 2 operational overhead—forcing teams to manage monitoring, upgrades, and compliance—which would have diverted resources from the core Carrara platform and significantly delayed time-to-market for BYOC and Azure support.
— Isaiah Norton
VP of Engineering, TileDB
TileDB made the strategic "buy-over-build" decision to accelerate its enterprise readiness. They selected Omnistrate's Control Plane-as-a-Service to solve the complex challenges of enterprise software distribution.
Omnistrate's platform provided the complete deployment and management framework that TileDB needed to operate at enterprise scale:
Accelerated Readiness on Microsoft Azure
Using Omnistrate's control plane, TileDB was able to quickly prepare its platform on Microsoft Azure as a secure BYOC deployment, immediately addressing a key market requirement.
Full Lifecycle Automation
Omnistrate automated the entire customer lifecycle for TileDB. The platform now supports self-service provisioning for new dedicated TileDB stacks. Omnistrate provides the foundation for managing the deployment, metering, logging, and future upgrades for TileDB, without manual intervention.
Guaranteed Customer Isolation
Omnistrate's architecture ensures that every TileDB customer receives a dedicated, isolated deployment of the TileDB platform running securely within their own cloud account. This directly satisfies the core data sovereignty and compliance requirements of HLS and other regulated industries.
Multi-Cloud Foundation
Omnistrate provided TileDB with a single, unified framework to manage deployments across all major cloud providers, starting with AWS and Azure, without TileDB's team needing to become experts in each cloud's specific tooling.
By using Omnistrate's control plane to deploy their platform, TileDB achieved a critical business transformation, becoming an enterprise-ready vendor capable of serving the most demanding HLS customers.
TileDB's business saw the following results:
New Enterprise Revenue Opportunities Unlocked
The ability to offer an automated, compliant BYOC deployment on Microsoft Azure immediately opened up a high-value pipeline of enterprise and HLS customers.
Accelerated Time-to-Market
TileDB's world-class engineers remained focused on advancing the Carrara data platform. They bypassed a 12-18 month internal project to build and ongoing effort to maintain a custom deployment control plane, avoiding significant undifferentiated heavy lifting.
From Manual to Self-Service Onboarding
The time-to-first-value for new enterprise customers is dramatically reduced. A high-friction manual process is replaced by instant, self-service provisioning, improving the customer experience and TileDB's operational efficiency.
Enterprise-Grade Compliance
TileDB can now confidently and scalably meet the stringent security and data residency requirements of its HLS and regulated clients.
TileDB's reputation in Healthcare & Life Sciences rests on guaranteeing ironclad data sovereignty. They recognized that engineering a truly enterprise-grade control plane—with the advanced compliance and governance features their customers demand, and a pathway to self-service marketplace deployments—was a different challenge entirely.
Omnistrate was the only partner that provided these critical features as-a-service, eliminating the risk and delay of a "DIY" build. This strategic choice allowed TileDB to immediately and confidently meet enterprise requirements on Azure, all while keeping their core engineers focused on the Carrara platform.
