2011 has been quite an eventful year for Cloudant. In the spring we outgrew our tiny basement offices in Davis Square and moved Cloudant HQ into Boston proper. We added a number of fantastic engineers to the team and we said goodbye to some of our earliest hires.

Going into the new year, we’ve expanded our platform to 5 geographic zones in the US and 3 more around the globe. Most importantly we more than doubled the number of developers, applications, small businesses, and enterprises using our hosted service – and found quite a few independent BigCouch users out there along the way. We continue to be surprised and delighted by the passion our users show for our products. It is that passion that drives us to continuously improve BigCouch and our hosted service.

With all that has been going on here, the founders decided it was time to expand the team. So today we are happy to announce that Derek Schoettle has joined Cloudant as our new CEO. Yes, Derek has an MBA – don’t hold that against him. His passion is working within early-stage companies bringing great technology to market, most recently at Vertica, and numerous startups before that. Derek has been an advisor to Cloudant for most of 2011 and was a natural choice when the time came. We are very excited to have him on board helping Cloudant grow.

With Derek on board, Adam, Mike and I will have more time to focus on the things we are passionate about . For me, that means working closely with our customers and users, focusing on building a great product that solves their data problems. Mike will continue to focus on customer success and outreach, and will hopefully have more time ‘on the road,’ evangelizing BigCouch to a wider audience. Adam will continue to work deep in the guts of Apache CouchDB, BigCouch, and the Cloudant platform, making all of our crazy thought experiments into real features.

2011 was a big year for Cloudant, but we have even bigger goals for 2012 (assuming the world doesn’t end.) Stay tuned to this channel as we announce some of the big features and plans we have.

Alan (for Adam and Mike)

Co-Founder, Cloudant