IBM’s planned Cloudant buy will advance cloud-based database services, but can the underlying database compete against Amazon DynamoDB, MongoDB, Couchbase, and DataStax?

IBM announced Monday that it intends to obtain Cloudant, a database-as-a-service (DBaaS) provider that delivers the open source Apache CloudDB as a service. IBM described it as a cloud services boost and a significant foray into the NoSQL database management system (DBMS) market, but it is not quite clear how CloudDB stacks up against better-known competitors.

IBM said it’s buying the privately held, Boston-based Cloudant to aid companies exploit big data, cloud, and mobile trends. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, suggesting it was a small acquisition. IBM touted Cloudant’s scalable, JSON-conversant database service because the right tool for the days, citing its simplicity, scalabilty, and open source credentials as key attractions to web- and mobile-app developers.

“Cloudant is delivered as a service, so developers needn’t be database experts or administrators, and that they needn’t know where the info goes to live or how it will scale,” said Sean Poulley, IBM VP for databases and knowledge warehousing, in a phone interview with InformationWeek. “In the event you check out the challenges people have with mobile and web apps, they fight with how they may be able to build them quickly and the way they build them for unpredictable levels of scale.”

Cloud service delivery is one competitive axis of this deal, and here IBM competes with the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace. Cloudant gives IBM a DBaaS option that’s already running on Softlayer, the corporate IBM acquired last year for $2 billion and has since invested another $1 billion to expand on Softlayer infrastructure because the backbone of IBM cloud services.

[Want more on IBM’s Softlayer investments? Read IBM Bets Big On Global Datacenter Network.]

Cloudant also runs on AWS and Rackspace, a bonus IBM said would help customers “build, test, deploy, and scale cloud apps on a number of hosting layers.”

The DBMS beneath Cloudant’s service is the second one competitive axis of this deal, but CloudDB is seldom mentioned inside the same sentence as NoSQL leaders resembling MongoDB, Cassandra (and support provider DataStax), and Couchbase. Nonetheless, IBM’s Poulley insisted that Cloudant and its BigCouch service in keeping with CouchDB offers better offline data synchronization for mobile apps than MongoDB does. And in highly distributed, global deployments, Poulley says Cloudant offers clustering and cargo-balancing capabilities that “aren’t particularly obvious” in alternatives, though these are hallmarks of Cassandra and Couchbase.

“Yow will discover many of the belongings you would find in Cloudant in a few of those contenders, but we found that no-one has the whole set,” Poulley elaborated. “Mongo, we do not think, has the rate of execution or scalability of Cloudant. And there are services capabilities built into Cloudant which are missing in Couchbase, just like the ability to do continuous, rolling updates without taking the service down.”

Executives at MongoDB and Couchbase scoffed on the suggestion that IBM is creating a serious play for the NoSQL market relying on CouchDB. “i don’t believe the Cloudant acquisition has anything to do with CouchDB,” said Matt Asay, MongoDB’s VP of promoting, business development, and company strategy. “i believe it’s really about building out database-as-a-service infrastructure on which they’ll emerge as deploying several different databases.”

Asay is undoubtedly hoping that MongoDB can be some of the databases supported in IBM’s cloud. Last year, IBM struck up a partnership with MongoDB to support its wire protocol and query language for mobile applications, and it’s even shipping MongoDB software along side its WebSphere application server.

The IBM-Mongo partnership is one more reason why Bob Wiederhold, CEO of Couchbase, doubts IBM is de facto looking on CouchDB. “If they are going to put plenty of resources behind CouchDB, that’s an instantaneous, competitive threat to their relationship with MongoDB,” Wiederhold told InformationWeek. “They’re buying a totally small company that has struggled to maintain, from a NoSQL database technology perspective, with leaders like MongoDB, DataStax, and Couchbase.”

Even where cloud competitors are concerned, CouchDB has its drawbacks as a solution to Amazon’s DynamoDB. Poulley touted the supply of Apache CouchDB software as assurance that buyers can take Cloudant deployments on-premises in the event that they choose, whereas DynamoDB is a proprietary service that’s only offered within the cloud. But Cloudant is the sole commercial company offering support for CouchDB, and it doesn’t offer on-premises software or support options. (Couchbase used to support CouchDB, but that was before it developed its current, completely separate product.) Will IBM step in and supply an on-premises support option?

“We’ve not yet developed a plan for an on-premises alternative to Cloudant,” said Poulley, but he didn’t rule out a future step. “We expect [the cloud] is a closer place to begin, but that does not mean we will not bring a NoSQL variant of Cloudant into an on-premises environment.”

As recently as last summer, Bob Picciano, recently appointed senior VP of IBM’s new Information and Analytics Group, was rather dismissive about NoSQL capabilities in an interview with InformationWeek, and he touted the JSON-data-handling capabilities of DB2. Enthusiasm has apparently grown, as Poulley said NoSQL “has its place” in web and mobile apps. IBM is “absolutely investing in NoSQL, whether it’s in BigInsights [IBM’s Hadoop distribution incorporating HBase] or what we’re doing here with JSON and Cloudant.”

IBM has made it clear that the Cloudant deal is ready rather more than adding DBaaS infrastructure. But a good way to win in NoSQL, the corporate goes to must clarify its strategy and put its weight behind one product, as Oracle has done with the Oracle NoSQL Database. Buying Cloudant to deal with NoSQL is absolutely not on par with buying Cognos to get into business intelligence, SPSS to delve into advanced analytics, or Netezza to feature a high-scale, massively parallel processing database. It is a tuck-in deal looking to fill big shoes.

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Doug Henschen is Executive Editor of InformationWeek, where he covers the intersection of enterprise applications with information management, business intelligence, big data and analytics. He previously served as editor in chief of Intelligent Enterprise, editor in chief of … View Full Bio

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