BOSTON, Jan. 8, 2013 - Cloudant today announced that it has joined the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an international consortium that serves as a forum for collaboration on the development of geospatial interoperability standards. By joining the OGC, Cloudant aims to integrate geospatial standards into the Cloudant NoSQL database as a service (DBaaS) so Web, mobile and proprietary app developers can more easily introduce new geospatial features and analytics into their applications.

OGC standards empower technology developers to make complex spatial information and services accessible to, and useful in, all kinds of applications.

"Cloudant's membership in the OGC reflects the importance of geospatial information to application developers," said Raj Singh, director of interoperability programs for OGC. "We share Cloudant's vision of integrating geospatial technology and dynamic database queries and look forward to their contributions, both in our consortium and to the open-source community at large."

With this announcement, Cloudant continues to advance its managed database service by building on its new search capabilities. In October 2012, Cloudant announced integrated text indexing and search based on Apache Lucene. Cloudant is building a high-availability geospatial platform based on its existing core technology, which supports distributed indices and multi-node queries.

"With the explosive rise in sensor data, machine-to-machine communications and mobile computing, geospatial data processing is extremely important to our customers," said Alan Hoffman, Cloudant co-founder and chief product officer. "We're excited to be working with the OGC to further enhance Cloudant's geospatial capabilities and to ensure future compatibility with developing geo standards. From the very beginning, we designed the Cloudant database service to be highly distributed and location-aware, and our participation in the OGC advances that strategy."

For more, see Cloudant's recent blog on its participation in the OGC: https://cloudant.com/blog/cloudant-joins-ogc .

About OGC The OGC is an international consortium of more than 480 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled.

About Cloudant Cloudant provides developers of large or fast-growing Web and mobile applications with the world's first globally distributed "data layer as a service" for loading, storing, analyzing, and distributing application data. The Cloudant Data Layer is a managed service that helps developers to eliminate the delays, costs, and distractions inherent in working with databases and their administrators, while providing unmatched scalability, availability, and performance. This capability accelerates time-to-market and time-to-innovation, because it frees developers from the mechanics of data management so they can focus exclusively on creating great applications. Cloudant is privately held and backed by top-tier investors including Avalon Ventures, In-Q-Tel, and Y Combinator. For more information, visit https://cloudant.com/ .