DataStax Inc., developer of an enterprise version of the Apache Cassandra NoSQL database, has acquired DataScale Inc. and will launch a fully managed cloud version of its DataStax Enterprise product.

Terms weren’t disclosed. DataScale is one of a handful of cloud-based management service providers that supports Cassandra, an open-source database engine that is prized for its scalability and resilience.

DataStax said its DataStax Managed Cloud will be available in early 2017 on the Amazon Web Services cloud platform, with Microsoft Azure and others to follow. The announcement coincides with Hortonworks Inc.’s announcement today of the Hortonworks Data Cloud on AWS. Together, the moves reflect the continued interest by businesses in moving big data deployments into the cloud in order to reduce complexity and speed start-up times.

“Customers have been clear with us that they want flexibility in how they deploy,” said Martin Van Ryswyk, executive vice president of engineering at DataStax. “There are plenty of people who don’t want to be in the data administration business and who want us to manage it for them.”

With fewer than 20 people, DataScale is a small, specialty service provider that boasts of being able to get customers up and running with their database implementations quickly. Its service currently runs both on AWS and Microsoft Azure, but DataStax doesn’t initially planned to support the Microsoft cloud.

It also doesn’t plan to support DataScale’s current cloud implementations of pure open-source Cassandra. Instead, Apache Cassandra customers will be automatically moved to DataStax. “It won’t be a tough migration,” Van Ryswyk said. DataStax made the decision not to continue Cassandra support because “we put a lot of work into enterprise quality and extensions (above), and the open source project doesn’t have all of that,” he said.

DataStax has a sales pipeline of about a dozen prospect companies that have asked for a hosted service, Van Ryswyk said. “I think managed services will become a double-digit percentage of our business pretty quickly,” he said.

In particular, DataStax plans to target hybrid deployments in which customers can “cloud burst” out of on-premise data centers into the cloud as capacity demands. “Our long-term vision is to make cloud bursting very structured and managed on the same control plane,” Van Ryswyk said.

The addition of the cloud option will entail introduction of a “whole new pricing model,” which hasn’t been determined yet, the executive said.