Tom Coates, a Senior Principal Architect at Nuance Communications, has been chosen as the newest Couchbase Community Champion. He is based in Seattle, WA, and splits his time between system design and coding for his company's Enterprise Proactive Engagement team. Tom chose Couchbase due to its scalability and ease of use, particularly its bi-directional XDCR feature, which enabled him to re-architect his company's monolithic platform into a suite of RESTful services that are largely backed by Couchbase. The new architecture has resulted in an order of magnitude increase in throughput with a smaller overall footprint. Tom credits XDCR for making high availability and rebalancing of GSIs possible, and wishes for automatic high availability of GSIs, rebalancing of GSIs, and MOIs and standard GSIs on the same cluster. In his free time, Tom enjoys reading, camping, fishing, and snowboarding. He is a fan of Jim Butcher's "The Dresden Files" series, which he finds to be an enjoyable escapism with a flawed hero and humor.