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IBM Cloudant, Great Managed NoSQL at Significant Cost
March 30, 2018

IBM Cloudant, Great Managed NoSQL at Significant Cost

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Cloudant

My organization had a need to store a moderate amount data for an insurance client. Our data storage solution needed to be flexible enough to support our BI solution as well as any in-house web apps the client might develop to their claims department. It also needed to be limited in the additional DBA overhead required to operate it. That is why my organization chose IBM Cloudant because it was able to meet the BI need, the needs of the web stack developers, and the DBA were kept happy too.
  • We had a small data mart project that required the storage of some rather highly connected data that also had a relatively small footprint. This made IBM Cloudant an obvious choice because we could store the data in a data structure that met our project need al while using a platform that our web development team understood and was comfortable with.
  • We had a bunch of geospatial data that we needed for analysis. Having GeoJSON being natively supported by Cloudant made it an easy choice.
  • Cloudant was cloud-based and didn't require a DBA support it, this allowed the project to move ahead without pushback from the infrastructure team.
  • It was only after we went with the cloud-based solution that IBM rolled out an on-premise version.
  • We found that a 3rd-party ODBC driver was required for a few applications that needed to pull data out of Cloudant.
  • The sales process was difficult because the salesperson we used was not as versed on Cloudant as I had hoped.
  • Cloudant allowed us to implement a project faster due to it being fully managed and basically a plug-and-play type data store.
  • Being fully managed meant that we spent a fair bit of time on the phone yelling at IBM Support because they didn't know jack about how to solve the issues we ran into/
  • Overall Cloudant worked for us because the project timeline and budget allowed for more money to be spent on services rather than hardware (OpEx vs CapEx).
We chose Cloudant because it was fully managed and used in the marketplace, unlike MongoDB was at the time, and it supported JSON which SQL Server 2016 didn't.
The solution to store claims information worked for us, but the enterprise NoSQL market has expanded so much that we might not [have] used Cloudant had an alternative been available. Make sure you ask about ACID compliance and about what the difference between NoSQL and SQL databases are to that the IT managers understand why they are buying and how that differs from data solutions they've bought in the past.

Evaluating IBM Cloudant and Competitors

  • Product Features
  • Prior Experience with the Product
  • Vendor Reputation
  • Existing Relationship with the Vendor
The single most important factor for us was that Cloudant fully supported on JSON storage needs and we had a relationship with IBM that allowed the sales process to move along smoothly. If another option has met our key needs, then we might have chosen something else.
The one thing we would change is by having more technologies to evaluate. The NoSQL market is flush right now with options, but during the build-up to our project, Cloudant seemed to be the one solution that management could be comfortable with.