IBM buys Compose to strengthen database as a service

IBM has acquired Compose, a DBaaS specialist

IBM has acquired Compose, a DBaaS specialist

IBM has acquired Compose, a database as a service provider specialising in NoSQL and NewSQL technologies.

Compose helps set up and manage databases running at pretty much any scale, deployed on all-SSD storage. The company’s platform supports most of the newer database technologies including MongoDB, Redis, Elastisearch, RethinkDB and PostgresSQL and is deployed on AWS, DigitalOcean and SoftLayer.

“Compose’s breadth of database offerings will expand IBM’s Bluemix platform for the many app developers seeking production-ready databases built on open source,” said Derek Schoettle, general manager, IBM Cloud Data Services.

“Compose furthers IBM’s commitment to ensuring developers have access to the right tools for the job by offering the broadest set of DBaaS service and the flexibility of hybrid cloud deployment,” Schoettle said.

Kurt Mackey, co-founder and chief executive of Compose said: “By joining IBM, we will have an opportunity to accelerate the development of our database platform and offer even more services and support to developer teams. As developers, we know how hard it can be to manage databases at scale, which is exactly why we built Compose –to take that burden off of our customers and allow them to get back to the engineering they love.”

IBM said the move would give a big boost to its cloud data services division, where it’s seeing some solid traction; this week the company said its cloud data services, one of its big ‘strategic imperatives’, saw revenues swell 30 per cent year on year. And according to a report cited by the IT incumbent and produced by MarketsandMarkets, the cloud-based data services market is expected to swell from $1.07bn in 2014 to $14bn by 2019.

This is the latest in a series of database-centric acquisitions for IBM in recent years. In February last year the company acquired database as a service specialist Cloudant, which built a distributed, fault tolerant data layer on top of Apache CouchDB and offered it as a service largely focused on mobile and web app-generated data. Before that it also bought Daeja Image Systems, a UK-based company that provides rapid search capability for large image files spread over multiple databases.