In yet another sign that IBM is serious about competing with Amazon and Google in the world of cloud computing, Big Blue has acquired Cloudant, a company offering an online database service meant for storing massive amounts of information.

Over the last 15 years, as their web empires grew, Amazon and Google designed brand new database systems capable of spreading information across thousands of computer servers, and these systems have completely changed the way other businesses store, retrieve, and analyze data. The two net giants now offer these systems to the rest of the world through various cloud services, and after publishing papers describing the way their systems operate, they've fueled the rise of many similar tools, known collectively as "NoSQL" databases.

Cloudant's service was built using one of these NoSQL databases, a tool called CouchDB. The service is designed for businesses that run mobile apps and other software that, behind the scenes, involves storing and processing massive amounts of data. The company's technology operates much like Amazon's DynamoDB and SimpleDB services, and it provides IBM with another means of directly competing with Amazon.

This is just one way that IBM is expanding its cloud services to survive in a world where businesses and developers build their applications with simple, internet-based technologies rather than hardware and complex enterprise software they install in their own data centers. Last year, IBM acquired SoftLayer, an Amazon rival that provides access to online processing power, and it recently launched an online version of Watson, its Jeopardy-winning machine learning platform, that serves as a way of analyzing large amounts of data.

The CouchDB Connection ———————-

It so happens that IBM has a long history with CouchDB, the database that underpins Cloudant. This open source database was part of the original NoSQL boom of the mid-to-late 2000s, but it wasn't initially influenced by Amazon or Google. CouchDB creator Damien Katz drew his original inspiration from Lotus Notes, which IBM acquired in 1995. Although it's mostly known as an email client, Lotus Notes is actually a database management system that can be used to build a variety of custom applications.

Katz, a former Lotus employee, began developing CouchDB in 2005 as a side project, and in 2007, he was hired by IBM to develop the database full-time. As part of the arrangement, IBM donated the database to the Apache Foundation, an organization that manages open source projects. This was fortunate, Katz told us previously, because donating the software to Apache meant granting open source developers permission to use any Lotus Notes related patents IBM owned. Katz ended up leaving IBM and founding a company later known as CouchOne, which merged with fellow NoSQL company Membase to become Couchbase in 2010.

Meanwhile, Cloudant was founded in 2008 by another team entirely: Mike Miller, Alan Hoffman, and Adam Kocoloski. The trio were scientists working on Large Hadron Collider projects at MIT. They needed a tool that could store the huge amounts of data the collider produced, so they created their own version of CouchDB called BigCouch, integrating ideas from Amazon's Dynamo research paper to improve the database's scalability.

After Katz announced in 2012 that Couchbase would focus its efforts on its own database technology instead of CouchDB, Cloudant vowed to contribute its BigCouch changes to the open source CouchDB project. These contributions were completed last year, and Cloudant has been focused on CouchDB ever since.

Cloudant will continue to contribute to the open source project after the acquisition Kocoloski wrote in an email to the CouchDB developers mailing list. Although not all of the project's developers work at Cloudant, the acquisition brings CouchDB full circle, with IBM once again funding the project's development.