CenturyLink Buys NoSQL Database-as-a-Service Firm Orchestrate

CenturyLink, the Monroe, Louisiana-based telecommunications and data center services giant, has acquired Orchestrate, a startup that provides a variety of NoSQL databases as a service through a single API (application programming interface). Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

While CenturyLink hosts and manages traditional Oracle or Microsoft SQL databases as services for some of its customers, this will be the first time the company will be offering NoSQL Database-as-a-Service in the expression’s true sense, the way Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure have been, Jonathan King, vice president of platform strategy and business development at CenturyLink, said.

The NoSQL database space has really evolved over the past several years, and developers often pick multiple databases for a single application because of the rise of new types of databases.

The Database-as-a-Service deal is another acquisition CenturyLink has made to go after the developer market. The company bought Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider Tier 3 and Platform-as-a-Service provider AppFog in 2013, going after the same group of users. Last year, it acquired cloud disaster recovery company DataGardens and a big data analytics firm called Cognilytics.

Running a variety of NoSQL databases on the backend, Orchestrate offers an API that supports whole-text search, graph, time series, key value, and geospacial queries – the types of queries necessary for building modern Internet-of-Things, mobile, or connected-web applications, Orchestrate CEO Antony Falco said.

The company, whose 10 staff members will be joining CenturyLink, is based in Portland, Oregon.

It has already expanded the number of data center locations its services are hosted at from two to six as a result of the acquisition. It added four CenturyLink locations (East Coast, West Coast of the U.S., U.K., and Singapore) to the previously existing AWS cloud locations on the East Coast and in Europe.

In addition to gaining new Database-as-a-Service capabilities, CenturyLink was attracted to the deal by the level of talent at Orchestrate, King said. Another reason was the need of a solution like Orchestrate in the giant’s own development efforts.