IBM is huge, and it's hard to give a general impression around the whole company that makes any sense. I can only really speak about CDS (the division Compose is joining and Cloudant is a part of) but I can say it's a really exciting place to work. CDS is about as fast-moving as you can get in a company this large, and the leadership really understands the shift to SaaS. We have a great team and a lot of autonomy to make decisions outside of the general corporate superstructure.
I'm biased but think it speaks highly that Cloudant people (Adam Kocoloski and Derek Schoettle) were tapped to lead this group.
It's a huge place, but I agree with ahoff, having come over along with the Cloudant acquisition. I feel pretty good about our little corner of IBM in CDS (cloud data services). It's not a bad place to end up if you're at a data management startup.
The shared DBs piece has been a tough nut to crack. We decided to release the new dashboard without that piece given how much of an upgrade the rest of it was. The feedback on the new dash has been overwhelmingly positive (except for the shared DBs piece.)
We are working on fixing that piece and completely deprecating the old UI. That change should be coming soon.
For now, this feature will stay a part of the closed-source hosted and licensed products. But remember you can always try it out for free with our Oxygen plan at cloudant.com
We learned of the application about 1 week before the deadline. We threw it together in an afternoon, spent a couple days editing, and turned it in just before the deadline. We basically thought "What the hell?" the worst thing that can happen is we don't get accepted, and then we will have only wasted the time we spent preparing the application. We had no demo and barely a coherent idea, so we focused our application on how awesome the founders were. We basically wanted to show that we were smart and we could build things, we figured that would get us to the interview round (and buy us some time to formulate our idea.)
You should apply even if you have to put the application together today. Just for the experience. At worst, you'll waste an afternoon. At best you'll get in, like we did (Cloudant YCS08 - Boston)
The disclosure at the bottom is laughable. It should read, "Michael Stonebraker has a strong economic incentive to steer enterprises away from NoSQL. Whenever a company chooses NoSQL, he will lose money. Hence, his opinions should be considered in this light." Oh, and full disclosure, I have a strong economic interest in promoting NoSQL.
As somebody who knows Mike Stonebraker and works for one of his RDBMS companies, I can honestly say he says this stuff because he really believes that NoSQL is history repeating itself.
Whether it's hierarchical databases, XML databases, objective databases, proprietary query languages, etc..., people keep trying new things and then coming back to the relational model and SQL. When people say "This time it's different", he gets annoyed. Maybe this time he's wrong, but with an understanding of the history of databases, it's easy for me to see his point of view.
Honestly, I'm not sure if antagonizing the NoSQL community helps his companies or not. The NoSQL crowd is pretty passionate.
Not sure why this is being downmodded. Stonebraker has a history of using his reputation to promote his businesses. Which is fine, but I don't think most people realize how much of a financial interest he has in downplaying nosql. Something his competitors like ahoff and I are very much aware of. :)
It's a bit over the top: "Whenever a company chooses NoSQL, he will lose money." - it's not like Stonebraker gets money every time someone sets up Mysql, or even Postgresql, which, IIRC, he was involved with at some early point in its history.
I'll admit it was a bit snarky, and written in haste. You said it much better. He wants to play the role of an objective observer here, almost like an expert journalist. But he definitely has skin in the game.
I don't mind that Stonebraker has a conflict of interest. He's marketing, I get it. I do mind that ACM has given him the platform to do it. Any other ACM publication would consider it incredibly unethical to publish articles with such clear conflicts.
Thanks for the kind words jot. The guys behind couch.io are smart and talented, and they really know their couchdb, but I don't think that hosting is their primary focus (they can correct me if I'm wrong).
The main technical difference between us and couch.io is the distribution (clustering) layer we've built. This allows a single couch database to be spread across multiple servers. It provides true horizontal scalability, not just multi-master replication. A database can expand elastically based on resource and concurrency needs. In our next release we'll be adding the ability to tune robustness via quorum constants (a la Amazon's dynamo) on a per-document basis. That should be coming soon.
IBM is a large company that does a lot. They put more money and people towards pure tech than most firms, especially in places like IBM Research.