IBM today announced that it has acquired Compose, the Y Combinator-backed database-as-a-service startup originally known as MongoHQ. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Compose had raised $6.4 million since it launched in 2010 — most of it in a Series A round in 2012 that was led by Trinity Ventures.
And IBM spokesperson tells us that Compose, which has offices in San Mateo, Calif., and Birmingham, Ala., will continue to operate as usual after the acquisition closes and that current users will not be impacted by this change. Compose says about 3,600 companies currently use its services and that its users, which span industries from retail to IoT and marketing services, have spun up over 100,000 databases so far.
While Compose started out as a MongoDB database specialist, the company now offers services around MongoDB, Elasticsearch, RethinkDB, Redis and PostgreSQL. The overall idea behind Compose is to allow mobile and web developers to create their apps without having to worry about their database backends.
Compose provisions the databases and then manages them for its customers (and scales them up and down as needed, too). Its users have access to a real-time dashboard to monitor their instances, which can be hosted on AWS, DigitalOcean and Softlayer. Now that Compose is part of IBM, it will likely soon support IBM’s Bluemix platform, too.
“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, in a press release this morning. “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 argues that this acquisition will give it access to an “enhanced framework to deliver highly sought after, production ready, cloud database services for developers.”
“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, the general manager of IBM Cloud Data Services, in today’s announcement. “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.”