As organizations develop next-generation applications for the digital era, many are using cognitive computing ushered in by IBM Watson® technology. Cognitive applications can learn and react to customer preferences, and then use that information to support capabilities such as confidence-weighted outcomes with data transparency, systematic learning and natural language processing. To make the most of these next-generation applications, you need a next-generation database. It must handle a massive volume of data while delivering high performance to support real-time analytics. At the same time, it must provide data availability for demanding applications, scalability for growth and flexibility for responding to changes.