Cloudant

Cloudant is an IBM software product, which is primarily delivered as a cloud-based service. Cloudant is an open source non-relational, distributed database service of the same name that requires zero-configuration. Cloudant is based on the Apache-backed CouchDB project and the open source BigCouch project.

Cloudant's service provides integrated data management, search, and analytics engine designed for web applications. Cloudant scales databases on the CouchDB framework and provides hosting, administrative tools, analytics and commercial support for CouchDB and BigCouch. Cloudant's distributed CouchDB service is used the same way as standalone CouchDB, with the added advantage of data being redundantly distributed over multiple machines.

Cloudant was acquired by IBM from the start-up company of the same name. The acquisition was announced on February 24th 2014, The acquisition was completed on March 4th.

History

Cloudant was founded by Alan Hoffman, Adam Kocoloski, and Michael Miller. The three met in the physics department at MIT where they worked with multi-petabyte data sets from experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. In early 2008 their ideas for fixing the "big data problem" caught the attention of Silicon Valley-based Y Combinator, which resulted in $20k seed funding. The company also received an early seed round of $1 million from Avalon Ventures in August 2010.