IBM Closes Purchase Of DBaaS Provider Cloudant

IBM has completed its acquisition of Cloudant, a privately held database-as-a-service (DBaaS) provider that enables developers to create mobile and Web apps.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Data Analytics

An active participant and contributor to the open-source database community Apache CouchDB, Cloudant offers high availability, elastic scalability and mobile device synchronisation.

Cloudant’s JSON cloud-based data service allows mobile and Web developers to store and access the explosion of mobile data using an application programming interface (API).

Cloudant complements IBM’s Big Data and Analytics portfolio by extending traditional data management technologies and providing a DBaaS to enable clients to accelerate the development of scalable mobile and Web apps.

IBM said it also is integral to the company’s MobileFirst solution, enabling developers who use Worklight, IBM’s mobile app development software, to create flexible and scalable apps that include a variety of structured and unstructured data.

In addition, developers have been embracing NoSQL databases because of their flexibility, with JSON becoming a popular NoSQL database technology for mobile and Web app developers.

“With the acquisition of Cloudant, IBM is helping to fuel a new era of next generation mobile and Web apps built on the cloud,” Sean Poulley, vice president of databases and data warehousing at IBM, said in a statement. “Boosting IBM’s big data and analytics, cloud computing and mobile offerings, Cloudant’s open, cloud database service will bring entirely new levels of simplicity and scalabilty to developers.”

Clients across a variety of industries, including gaming, financial services, mobile device manufacturers, online learning, retail and health care are already using Cloudant technology.

For example, video game developer Hothead Games relies on Cloudant to scale application data for its series of Big Win Sports mobile games on iPhone, iPad and Android smartphones and tablets.

IBM SoftLayer

“Our decision to join IBM marks a clear shift in the way modern software is built,” Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle said in a statement. “A new generation of developers has grown up coding against Web frameworks and cloud infrastructure. When Cloudant launched in 2010, we knew this next wave of innovation would be a core market for our service. Now in 2014, we’re seeing Web development transition to the enterprise, and, as part of IBM, we couldn’t be in a better spot.”

Cloudant will now run on the IBM SoftLayer platform and its database services will be available on BlueMix, IBM’s platform as service (PaaS) that combines IBM software, third-party and open technologies to enable developers to create apps in the cloud.

IBM also noted Cloudant technology would help strengthen the company’s cloud computing offerings by providing developers with the tools and resources to build, test, deploy and scale cloud apps on a variety of hosting layers.

Are you a Big Blue Masterbrain? Try our IBM quiz!

Interested in hearing more about the cloud? Sign up for our IBM webinar on 26 March!

Originally published on eWeek.