IBM Buys Compose for DBaaS, Opens Cloud-based Data Warehouse Service

IBM (IBM) said it has bought Compose, a San Mateo, CA-based Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) provider targeting web and mobile application developers with services such as MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch and PostgreSQL.

Terms of the transaction weren’t disclosed by either party. IBM said it made the deal to advance its commitment to open source and cloud data services surrounding developer productivity and innovation.

The growing popularity among developers for tools that make web and mobile applications easy to build and grow without back-end database and systems administration is fueling the segment toward what is expected to reach $14 billion in sales by 2019.

Compose said its DBaaS offering is designed to relieve developers of the burden and expense of database administration. The company offers 24×7 monitoring and management, containerized DBaaS platform technology, auto-scaling, built-in redundancy, backup and failover for uninterrupted service and application uptime, and a set of add-on features.

Industry segments such as retail, IoT, higher education, marketing services and ecommerce have created over 100,000 databases with Compose, IBM said.

“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, IBM Cloud Data Services general manager.

“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,” he said.

Kurt Mackey, Compose co-founder and chief executive, said the deal enables the company to “accelerate the development of our database platform and offer even more services and support to developer teams.”

He said IBM’s resources will help Compose take the burden of managing databases at scale from developers and “allow them to get back to the engineering they love.”

DashDB Enterprise

Separately, IBM launched a cloud-based data warehouse service aimed at enabling enterprise customers to forego housing large amounts of data on premise and speed up access to information.

The IBM DashDB Enterprise MPP (for massive parallel processing) is available on the company Bluemix portal of services and offers and end-to-end managed data warehousing, the vendor said, as PC World reported.

“You used to have to go through a number of steps to get to the data,” Schoettle told PC World. “That is changing. People now want immediate access to the data,” he said.

As PC World reported, the cloud-based data warehouse service market is getting crowded. DashDB competes with Amazon’s (AMZN) Redshift, Microsoft (MSFT) Azure’s SQL Data Warehouse, and new players such as Snowflake Computing and Coolodata.

IBM expects enterprise clients to deploy DashDB to format and store data for later analysis, particularly for functions such as addressing database queries to large volumes of data not suitable for an on premise database, Schoettle said.