The stock of Oracle Corporation (NYSE:ORCL) closed at $49.01 gaining 0.89% in Friday’s trading session. The scenario of startups taking on incumbents in an enormous market has over the years been a fascinating topic to many in the financial world. One start ups seem determined to strike a partnership with Oracle.

One of the market experts about four years ago engaged the CEO of a database maker run by a football star in an in-depth discussion. One thing that came out from this was the fact that the company had been witnessing immense growth. The market expert went further to pressure the CEO to discuss a possible IPO. It was in vain since he turned down the request.

A January 2014 interview held at Santa Clara had Billy Bosworth speak about DataStax. He affirmed that it was indeed the company behind Apache Cassandra [open source database].

It is one of the most trusted companies when it comes to delivering the always-on NoSQL [no Structured Query Language] database that allows users to have their data anywhere, everywhere, at all times. That scales to very high levels.

No one should mistake Bosworth for a typical Silicon Valley CEO considering that fact that he is a football player from Pittsburgh who happens to have played on the University of Louisville football team.

At that point in time he had been taking his computer study course while at the same time coaching high school football for a record 13 years. In Dallas at the Quest Systems he got himself a place as both the general manager and the database administrator and it was here that he struck a partnership with DataStax.

May 2011 witnessed him move into DataStax as CEO and at that time it had only 19 people.

He opined, “You cannot build today’s applications on 25-year-old technology from Oracle. We support an open source database, Cassandra, that has the scalability and availability that today’s applications require.”

By the time he was taking over the company had been up and running for almost a year from the time it was founded.