One of the hardest parts of running a global business like Cloudant isn’t necessarily on the technical side of things. While we certainly got better at developing & operating a fleet of clusters that now spans both US coasts & Asia, we’ll admit to still being somewhat under-skilled at tackling some of our marketing concerns, such as estimating latent demand in foreign markets.

In recent months, our support team has been receiving more & more inquiries about provisioning Cloudant accounts in Europe. But instead of trying to guess who else is interested, run complex spreadsheet models or hire a team of consultants, we figured we’d just ask you. (Yes, you: Time magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year.) To limit the noise in this poll, we’ll ask you to put your money where your mouth is: we’ll only accept reservations from paying customers (i.e., users on an “Argon” plan or above).

Having your data located a cluster close to your application layer (or other consumers of your CouchDB docs) has a big primary benefit: latency. With a cluster in Europe, your median read & write latencies to Europe should go down by approximately 200ms (or by ~500ms for SSL access), when compared to our existing East Coast cluster .

So go on ahead to our reservation page. You’ll be asked to sign up for Cloudant if you don’t already have an account; or upgrade to a paid account if you’re currently on our “Oxygen” plan.

We’ll let you know how the process is going with a handy reservation progress bar. We’ll set up our European cluster and load it with the accounts that reserved a spot, as soon as that bar hits 100%!

Go ahead and tell us you’re interested!