Big day for Cloudant — and big news in the near future for all BigCouch users. We are happy to announce that biotech heavyweight and perennial Fortune 500 company Monsanto has chosen Cloudant to be the core of their new genome analysis platform.

We’ve been working with them for a few weeks now and we couldn’t be more thrilled with the partnership. We are no strangers to the analysis of the big bytes generated by the smallest of things. Our founders first devised our open-source platform BigCouch while at MIT, working on Large Hadron Collider experiments generating millions of data points per second from the collision of atomic particles. Turns out, Biotechnology & genome analysis is no different in this regard. As GigaOM summarized it: “innovation is rampant, but data growth is outpacing the ability to analyze it, making faster, cheaper and more scalable data systems integral to leveling the playing field”.

This is new ground for us — and for NOSQL as a whole. This Monsanto platform is not destined to toil away in one of their (many) R&D labs, only used by scientists with lab coats & beakers. We’re not powering the CMS of some administrative division or a minor part of their website. Cloudant’s BigCouch will be the core, for both storage and analysis of a new, company-wide platform powering a fundamental aspect of a Fortune 500 business: the analysis & identification of new traits & genomic combinations in agricultural crops. The data & reporting interfaces will be used across Monsanto and should be instrumental in the making of key business decisions.

Now, this also means big news for our users. Monsanto has been very eager to let us open-source many of the core enhancements we make to BigCouch for them. So while this won’t quite make it into the impending BigCouch 0.4 release (which is days away now), or on our cloudant.com clusters for another few months, you can definitely expect to see many Monsanto-driven improvements folded back into our offerings, such as support for more languages on view servers, new tools to model data workflows, as well as a flurry of improvements to our storage & retrieval algorithms.

At Cloudant, we’re all excited to see NOSQL platforms, including BigCouch, being used to power the next generation of business technology. So when announcements like this also translate to a more stable, performant & productive experience, for everybody else that uses a Cloudant product, we find it to be a big day indeed.

You can always contact us if you have any questions. There is also a press release available.