"Hello-- Today is an exciting day for Cloudant as a business: We have agreed to be acquired by IBM [press release].
What does that mean for you as a customer? Not too much changes, actually.
The key elements of Cloudant that have helped make us successful will not change. Our team will remain intact and will continue to focus on delivering innovative products backed by our world-class operations, services and support teams. Cloudant’s product strategy and roadmap will continue as before, only with faster innovation. By tapping into IBM’s global resources, we can rapidly scale our service and introduce new products that will benefit customers.
Our position of providing a cloud-agnostic data layer will not change and remains an important differentiator for our business. We know that customers need options to prevent vendor lock-in as the cloud industry consolidates. Cloudant and IBM are the latest example of this trend, yes, but with some important distinctions.
We have a clear agreement in place to continue developing and promoting Cloudant as an open platform. Widely accepted standards like JSON and REST APIs will remain, so customers can quickly migrate onto and off of Cloudant as needs change. Cloudant’s participation in the open source community will continue, and at an accelerated pace. IBM has a track record of funding and promoting open technologies, like Linux. Over time, we’ll work toward a similar model with the open source communities close to Cloudant.
Thank you for your continued support of our business. And look for more good things from Cloudant and IBM, coming soon.
Sincerely,
Derek Schoettle CEO, Cloudant"