

IBM to Acquire Cloudant - davis_m
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/43238.wss

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rdtsc
It is funny this kind of came full circle. Damien Katz, the original CouchDB
author was working on Lotus Notes as some point in his life. After many years,
his "creation" comes back to IBM. There is some irony in there I think.

I remember him disavowing CouchDB and urging everyone to "ride with him"
towards Couchbase. There were promises about how CouchDB will get
contributions from Couchbase, and how it will get RPM and packaging scripts,
docs and continued help. But not much of that happened. The community split.
Most CouchDB developers who ended up on the other side of the fense at
Couchbase didn't end up committing or helping that much over the years. So I
can't see, looking back, anything good at all about that split.

But Cloudant sort of took over helping and watching over CouchDB. Quite a few
of the contributors work for CouchDB, and they are very smart and helpful
individuals. I hope this means good news for CouchDB as a project. I would
want to see it grow.

~~~
omh
_It is funny this kind of came full circle. Damien Katz, the original CouchDB
author was working on Lotus Notes as some point in his life_

It's definitely interesting. I can remember people in the Notes community
wondering why IBM didn't either take CouchDB and use it as a new Notes
backend, or alternatively push the existing Notes bits as a mature document-
based database.

The end quote from Katz's "Formula Engine Rewrite" post[1] is interesting:

"But ultimately IBM killed Iris. In late 2001 IBM folded Iris Associates and
converted all the employees to IBM. All the energy the Iris building had was
seeping out. Really it was more pushed out by the BS that IBM management kept
trying to sell us..."

[1] [http://damienkatz.net/2005/01/formula-engine-
rewrite.html](http://damienkatz.net/2005/01/formula-engine-rewrite.html)

~~~
markc
Damien's writeup is well worth a read, esp. by programmers who want to know
what it takes to get to a high level of proficiency. The Iris work appears to
have been a critical experience in preparing Damien to write Couch. Anyone who
wants to become a great programmer should read this and emulate his example.

I was at Iris around that time too, and went through the IBM slow-death. I
really felt like we had to spend at least one whole day per week (maybe more)
dicking around with HR stuff. Career objectives, self-eval, performance
reviews, peer reviews.

Facilities and IT systems were a horror show too. I spent 2 whole days
registering with various internal websites, filling out forms, getting
permissions - just trying to get rid of an unwanted monitor. At Iris you'd
just put unwanted stuff outside your office and it would be gone the next day.

Funny, losing the amazing Iris tech-bubble perks kind of sucked, but it was
really the daily "being an employee" overhead and red-tape that made IBM
unbearable.

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davis_m
The email I received from Cloudant:

"Hello-- Today is an exciting day for Cloudant as a business: We have agreed
to be acquired by IBM [press release].

What does that mean for you as a customer? Not too much changes, actually.

The key elements of Cloudant that have helped make us successful will not
change. Our team will remain intact and will continue to focus on delivering
innovative products backed by our world-class operations, services and support
teams. Cloudant’s product strategy and roadmap will continue as before, only
with faster innovation. By tapping into IBM’s global resources, we can rapidly
scale our service and introduce new products that will benefit customers.

Our position of providing a cloud-agnostic data layer will not change and
remains an important differentiator for our business. We know that customers
need options to prevent vendor lock-in as the cloud industry consolidates.
Cloudant and IBM are the latest example of this trend, yes, but with some
important distinctions.

We have a clear agreement in place to continue developing and promoting
Cloudant as an open platform. Widely accepted standards like JSON and REST
APIs will remain, so customers can quickly migrate onto and off of Cloudant as
needs change. Cloudant’s participation in the open source community will
continue, and at an accelerated pace. IBM has a track record of funding and
promoting open technologies, like Linux. Over time, we’ll work toward a
similar model with the open source communities close to Cloudant.

Thank you for your continued support of our business. And look for more good
things from Cloudant and IBM, coming soon.

Sincerely,

Derek Schoettle CEO, Cloudant"

~~~
dochtman
The Cloudant CTO also commented on the CouchDB developer's list:

[http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-dev/201402....](http://mail-
archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/couchdb-
dev/201402.mbox/%3C86FF6E4F-D4AF-4E3C-A94F-6C7243AB122B%40cloudant.com%3E)

~~~
rdtsc
That link doesn't work for me

~~~
mbroberg
Here's the email that Cloudant's CTO sent to Apache CouchDB:

SUBJECT: Cloudant & IBM: Our Commitment to Apache CouchDB

Apache CouchDB means a great deal to me, and to Cloudant as a company.
Cloudant and CouchDB have grown alongside each other over the past several
years in one of the more authentic vendor/community collaborations I can think
of in Apache history. Today marks the next step in Cloudant’s growth as we
enter into a definitive agreement to become part of IBM.

What does this mean for CouchDB? I would not have agreed to this transaction
if I had any concerns about Cloudant’s ability to continue its contributions
and collaboration with Apache CouchDB. IBM has a strong track record in open
source software and a productive relationship with Apache; in fact, IBM was
instrumental in bringing CouchDB to the ASF many years ago. IBM is fully
supportive of our efforts here, and I’m looking forward to bringing increased
resources to bear in support of the project.

CouchDB has the potential to shape the future of distributed data management
and computing. 2013 was a year of tremendous progress, as we doubled our
committer base and shipped no fewer than eight releases. Already in 2014 we’ve
seen amazing progress on long-standing initiatives to enhance the core of the
system. The timing is right — in the market and for the community — to take
the next big step forward. With your help, that is exactly what we will do.

Truly, the future of CouchDB is CouchDB.

Adam Kocoloski Co-Founder & CTO, Cloudant

~~~
nslater
Posted this to the blog:

[https://blogs.apache.org/couchdb/entry/cloudant_and_ibm_our_...](https://blogs.apache.org/couchdb/entry/cloudant_and_ibm_our_commitment)

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rch
Any details on the value of this deal floating around? At one point it seemed
like all new database startups were getting pretty stratospheric valuations.
At least relative to their user base.

I'm sure congratulations are in order regardless. The Cloudant team certainly
deserves it. They've delivered consistently impressive results with their own
product offerings, and with Apache CouchDB.

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mark_l_watson
I have been a very long term customer of Cloudant (low usage, low cost
customer) and I have always appreciated their tech. Especially good of them to
open source BigCouch.

I doubt IBM buying them will change much of their business for customers.

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teepo
This will likely further integrate into IBM's SoftLayer platform. The
SoftLayer API already integrates with Cloudant, perhaps this means that all
Cloudant compute would migrate to the SoftLayer bare metal server
infrastructure. This essentially adds dedicated hardware, global footprint for
data distribution, and SLA far in excess than what you can get with something
like AWS Dynamo.

~~~
mlmilleratmit
Actually, the majority of our servers have been on SL bare metal since ~2010.

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fuddle
Any ideas on the valuation of Cloudant?

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BallinBige
Their new redesign has been pretty difficult to get use to, especially with
shared DB's.

~~~
ahoff
The shared DBs piece has been a tough nut to crack. We decided to release the
new dashboard without that piece given how much of an upgrade the rest of it
was. The feedback on the new dash has been overwhelmingly positive (except for
the shared DBs piece.)

We are working on fixing that piece and completely deprecating the old UI.
That change should be coming soon.

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tzm
Congrats team Cloudant!

