IBM has announced that it has completed the acquisition of Cloudant, Inc
., a privately held database-as-a-service (DBaaS) provider that enables developers to easily and quickly create next generation mobile and web apps. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Clients across a variety of industries, including gaming, financial services, mobile device manufacturers, online learning, retail and healthcare are already using Cloudant technology. For instance, video game developer Hothead Games relies on Cloudant to scale application data for its popular series of Big Win Sports mobile games on iPhone(R), iPad(R) and Android(TM) phones and tablets. With Cloudant running on IBM SoftLayer, Hothead Games can efficiently handle large influxes of users, even when traffic spikes a hundred-fold.
Cloudant will extend IBM’s leadership in Big Data and Analytics, Cloud Computing and Mobile, further helping clients take advantage of these key areas of growth for their businesses. It joins IBM’s newly formed Information and Analytics Group, a business unit within the IBM Software & Systems Group led by Senior Vice President Bob Picciano.
“With the acquisition of Cloudant, IBM is helping to fuel a new era of next generation mobile and web apps built on the cloud,” said Sean Poulley, vice president, Databases & Data Warehousing, IBM. “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.”
Cloudant, an active participant and contributor to the open source database community Apache CouchDB(TM), delivers high availability, elastic scalability and innovative mobile device synchronization. Cloudant’s JSON cloud-based data service allows mobile and web developers to quickly and easily store and access the explosion of mobile data using an application programming interface (API) that is significantly easier to use than alternatives.
Increasingly, developers have embraced NoSQL databases because of their flexibility, and JSON has become the predominant NoSQL database technology for mobile and web app developers.
“Our decision to join IBM marks a clear shift in the way modern software is built,” said Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle. “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 complements IBM’s Big Data and Analytics portfolio by extending traditional data management technologies and providing a database-as-a-service to enable clients to simplify and accelerate the development of scalable mobile and web apps.
It also is integral to IBM’s MobileFirst solution, enabling developers who use Worklight, IBM’s mobile app development software, to quickly create flexible, reliable and scalable apps that include a variety of structured and unstructured data.
The Cloudant technology will also help strengthen IBM’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. Cloudant runs on the IBM SoftLayer platform today and its database services will be available on BlueMix, IBM’s new platform-as-service (PaaS) that combines the strength of IBM software, third-party and open technologies to enable developers to create apps in the cloud.