$12M Investment in Cloudant
$12M Investment in Cloudant by UCStrategies Staff
$12 million of Series B funding has been presented to Boston, Massachusetts-based Cloudant; this comes from a number of investors, including Rackspace Hosting.
Distributed database as a service (DBaaS) is offered by Cloudant, and at present the company partners with Rackspace, which makes a portion of its hosting service available for the running of Cloudant’s DBaaS. Additionally, the company partners with Softlayer, Joyent, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services for hosting; Cloudant competes with the latter.
Other contributors to this round of funding for Cloudant are Devonshire Investors and Toba Capital, and former investors have included Avalon Ventures, In-Q-Tel and Samsung Venture Investment Corp., who have acquired extra shares of the company.
The NoSQL database service is provided ahead of cloud hosting services from partners such as Rackspace, and allows businesses to store, access and analyse data in the cloud. The clusters are provisioned by Cloudant, and allows clients to pay more attention to their applications and data because it handles system monitoring and management.
The vice president of sales and field operations at Cloudant, Tom O’Connell, stated that his company is reaping the benefits of the increase in mobile applications and businesses’ growing need to offload management of back-end IT operations.
He said: “Our value proposition is for the client to focus on the front-end development and APIs where they're an expert, and let us manage the back end where we are an expert. We're in a perfect storm of companies wanting to build mobile apps or move existing applications to mobile devices.”
Although Cloudant has a number of hosting partners, Rackspace is seen to be the keenest in going to market with Cloudant’s DBaaS, according to O’Connell. Cloudant is interested in making more solution provider partners available on the application development and mobile solutions side, as well as collaborating with hosting partners and application platform vendors such as Heroku and AppHarbor.
O’Connell stated: “There's a big opportunity in the channel. We want to work with more systems integrators because a lot of our clients are contracting out the mobile app development and management to them.”
Cloudant also seeks to expand the reach of the company beyond the U.S. and the U.K., where an office was recently opened. O’Connell said: “We're going to spend some of the funding on expanding outside of North America and into Asia. There's a huge opportunity in Asia, and plus we have an existing relationship with Samsung on the investment side.”
The funding will also be used to enhance the DBaaS offering and provide additional geospatial features. (CY) Link