Cloudant, provider of a globally distributed database-as-a-service (DBaaS), has opened a new UK headquarters in Bristol. The opening will aid expansion into Europe, create local jobs and see it invest in technology skills.
The company, which produces a database software solution that is hosted and operated in the cloud on behalf of its customers, was conceived in 2008 by a group of physicists from the world-renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At the time, they were moving multi-petabyte data sets around from the Large Hadron Collider experiments at CERN in Geneva. Frustrated by the lack of suitable software for doing their research, the founders built their own and soon found a multitude of commercial uses, as well as commercial demand, for the product.
Today, Cloudant serves mobile and web application data to users around the world on behalf of thousands of developers and hundreds of household-name customers, including Samsung, DHL and Monsanto.
The rapid growth in demand for its services in Europe has led the company to open offices in historic Hobbs Lane in the centre of Bristol as part of a wider UK and European business expansion programme that will see Cloudant create new jobs for software developers and other technology staff in the area.
'Establishing our European base in Bristol is not only good for Cloudant, it represents an endorsement of the skills available in the area and an acknowledgement of the scientific and technology knowledgebase we can tap into,' said Simon Metson, director of UK engineering at Cloudant and a former CERN research associate at the University of Bristol.
'We’ve been able to secure a wonderful workspace in the centre of this vibrant city, and being in Bristol will not only allow us to support our customers throughout the UK and Europe, it will also provide us with great opportunities for growing the team, thanks to the incredibly skilled local workforce coming out of academia, engineering, manufacturing and other highly-skilled, technology-driven sectors that operate in the area,' Metson added.
