IBM Acquires Compose to Expand Cloud Data Services

ARMONK, N.Y. - 23 Jul 2015: IBM (NYSE: IBM ) today announced the acquisition of San Mateo, CA-based Compose, Inc. , a privately held company that provides MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, and other database as a service (DBaaS) offerings targeted at web and mobile app developers. The acquisition furthers IBM’s commitment to accelerating developer productivity and innovation around open source and cloud data services. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The cloud database arena is projected to be worth $14 billion by 2019 , and open source databases like MongoDB are a significant part — and rapidly growing portion — of this sector. Driving this popularity among developers is the ability to make web and mobile applications easy to build and grow, without the distraction and monotony of back-end database and systems administration. Thousands of clients across a variety of industries, including retail, IoT, higher education, marketing services and ecommerce have created over 100,000 databases with Compose.

“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.”

IBM’s Cloud Data Services offerings are composable, integrated services for developers that run on the secure, high-performance IBM Cloud platform, Bluemix, with highly accessible DevOps support teams. Compose provides IBM with an enhanced framework to deliver highly sought after, production ready, cloud database services for developers. IBM’s containerized data services approach will further drive the introduction of new Cloud Data Services offerings.

“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,” said Kurt Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Compose. “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.”

Companies are eager to leverage new managed database technologies, but are not always equipped to dedicate the budget and resources necessary to acquire database administration expertise. Compose removes the difficulty and risk associated with setting up, administering, scaling and integrating new DBMS technologies.

In addition to providing 24x7 monitoring and management by DBaaS DevOps experts, Compose features:

· “Containerized” DBaaS platform technology –enabling fast deployment and scaling of popular open source DBaaS services for customers;

· Auto-scaling with predictable performance;

· Built-in redundancy, backup, failover for uninterrupted DBaaS service & application uptime;

· Valuable add-ons including Compose Transporter, which helps developers move data between services like MongoDB and Elasticsearch for easier application development and to provide a better end-user experience.

The acquisition of Compose continues IBM’s commitment to open source technology and communities across the entire cloud stack. In addition to this latest announcement, and the announcement to make the company’s container technology available through Docker last month, IBM serves as a founding member of The Cloud Foundry and OpenStack Foundations, a platinum sponsor of the Node.js Foundation and a sponsor of the Open Container Project.

About Compose

Founded in 2010, Compose offers auto-scaling, production-ready databases to help software development teams deploy data services quickly and easily. Compose currently supports five popular open source databases including MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL and RethinkDB. Each database is provisioned in minutes and includes high availability (HA), failover, and daily backups. In addition, Compose offers Transporter for moving and syncing data continuously between data stores —available both as a service and as a free open source application. More than 3600 companies rely on Compose-hosted databases for keeping their apps in production 24/7.

For information about how IBM Cloud Data Services is changing the way services are created for and delivered to developers, follow us on Twitter at @getdashDB and @IBMcloudant, and visit www.dashdb.com and www.cloudant.com.