IBM's Latest Cloud Acquisition Aims Directly at Amazon | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

Back to the future?

"It so happens that IBM has a long history with CouchDB, the database that underpins Cloudant. This open source database was part of the original NoSQL boom of the mid-to-late 2000s, but it wasn’t initially influenced by Amazon or Google. CouchDB creator Damien Katz drew his original inspiration from Lotus Notes, which IBM acquired in 1995. Although it’s mostly known as an email client, Lotus Notes is actually a database management system that can be used to build a variety of custom applications.
Katz, a former Lotus employee, began developing CouchDB in 2005 as a side project, and in 2007, he was hired by IBM to develop the database full-time. As part of the arrangement, IBM donated the database to the Apache Foundation, an organization that manages open source projects."

IBM's Latest Cloud Acquisition Aims Directly at Amazon | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com