A diagram illustrates the anatomy of a Cloudant database node.
Managed and distributed database technology firm Cloudant announced a set of company milestones from 2012 this week, most notably, twelve-fold growth in recurring monthly revenue numbers that may hint at a big future for the company’s database as a service business model.
Cloudant says that during 2012, a year that saw its staff grow to 45 employees, the company’s customer base grew to more than 12,000 multi-tenant customers, counting both free customers, as well as the 50 that pay for its dedicated clusters.
Cloudant provides a hosted database solution using a scalable data layer on top of Apache CouchDB. It is designed to provide a solution to the challenging of handling and analyzing big data. The company’s multi-tenant solution includes a free trial, and is priced per GB stored, and per data access request.
Dedicated pricing is per-node; the Cloudant website asks customers to contact the company for pricing. Among the customers the company served during 2012 was a London Olympics project that stored and analyzed millions tweets per day to create a “lightshow of Olympics sentiment” on the London Eye.
Along with the revenue growth, Cloudant’s 2012 milestones included new partnerships with companies including SoftLayer and Rackspace; the addition of new points of presence in Europe, Asia, and North America; the inclusion of some of Cloudant’s BigCouch fork into the official CouchDB code; the addition of new search functions; a group of key appointments; the promotion of its technology in the US intelligence community; and membership in the Open Geospacial Consortium.
“Cloudant’s growth and commercial success in 2012 reflects growing interest in database-as-a-service technology,” said Cloudant CEO Derek Schoettle, quoted in the press release. “Fast-growing web and mobile app businesses are realizing that scaling and administering a back-end database in-house is a costly, antiquated practice that adds no competitive differentiation. Cloudant allows developers to focus on what matters most: creating a great user experience. We look forward to another strong year of growth, innovation, and satisfying customers.”
Talk back: do you offer customers a big data solution, or a hosted database offering? Have you weighed building a solution or partnering with a provider such as cloudant? Let us know in the comments.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
