BOSTON, MA — (Marketwire) — 10/12/11 — Cloudant, leading architects & operators of -big data- technology, announced today they are working with agriculture company Monsanto Company to jointly develop a next-generation data integration and visualization platform based on the Cloudant suite.
Monsanto, who uses advanced breeding and biotechnology to develop seed and trait technology for farmers, will utilize Cloudant to accelerate genome sequencing data analysis in crops. The company-s new discovery platform is based on Cloudant-s large-scale, complex data storage and analytics platform, BigCouch.
“We enable our customers to store, manage and better analyze big data sets to accelerate their progress,” said Alan Hoffman, CEO and co-founder of Cloudant. “Monsanto-s biotechnology and genomics R&D is the perfect example of how businesses can best leverage information from massive amounts of data. Working with Monsanto on such vital research in basic science is one of the most gratifying experiences we could hope to be part of — and we get to advance big data technology in the process: making it as open, flexible and powerful as possible while research data continues to advance.”
The platform will accelerate the rate at which Monsanto analyzes next-generation genome sequencing data through trait physiology data from the field and greenhouse. This multi-scale modeling will enable Monsanto to target the key genetic pathways necessary to increase yield and stress tolerance in corn, soy and other crops. BigCouch will also allow the company to identify additional pipeline gene candidates in order to increase farmer-s crop yields in core crops of corn, cotton and soybeans, while using fewer inputs.
“Monsanto-s growing body of data gives us the unprecedented opportunity to build integrated models of yield and other agronomic traits,” said Ryan Richt, Monsanto genome integration lead. “The document-oriented nature of the open source BigCouch platform is ideal for computing over this complex and constantly changing body of data. We are building a distributed analysis platform that will automate our genome analysis and discovery efforts.”
Monsanto researchers use advanced breeding and biotechnology techniques to develop traits that will benefit farmer customers. Monsanto scientists are learning to read and write this genetic code using a diverse array of high-throughput experiments and data.
The Cloudant founders are leaders in managing and rapidly analyzing massive amounts of complex, computational data. A recognized innovator in -big data,- Cloudant created the BigCouch open source software to extend the functionality of Apache CouchDB, the most established NoSQL database technology. Cloudant founders were members of the renowned Large Hadron Collider project at CERN, where they worked with multi-petabyte data sets for high-energy particle physics research. Collectively frustrated with available tools to manage and analyze massive data sets, Cloudant was born out of the famed Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator in 2008.
For more information on Cloudant-sponsored open source BigCouch and to learn about the latest offering go to .
Monsanto Company is a leading global provider of technology-based solutions and agricultural products that improve farm productivity and food quality. Monsanto remains focused on enabling both small-holder and large-scale farmers to produce more from their land while conserving more of our world-s natural resources such as water and energy. To learn more about our business and our commitments, please visit: . Follow our business on Twitter® at , on the company blog, Beyond the Rows® at , or subscribe to our News Release RSS Feed.
Cloudant-s leading hosting & analytics platform is available to customers two ways: either as Database-as-a-Service, served from the public cloud of their choice, including Amazon EC2, Heroku, Joyant, Rackspace, and SoftLayer, or à-la-carte licensed software for internal or “private cloud” deployments. Cloudant-s platform includes BigCouch, a distributed, Dynamo-style document database based on Apache CouchDB, and a graphical data input & querying interface for users and analysts, a fully-featured monitoring system and now Cloudant Search, which integrates full-text search and advanced querying with Cloudant-s scalable database suite.
Founded in Cambridge, MA by three MIT PhDs, Cloudant provides a hosted, distributed database and data analytics platform for the cloud. Cloudant-s data platform is based on the open source Apache CouchDB project and designed from the ground up for distributed environments and cloud computing. The Cloudant team has over two decades experience solving “Big Data” problems and led the MIT team that interacted with multi-petabyte data sets from experiments including the renowned Large Hadron Collider. Cloudant was born in 2008 out of the founders- collective frustration with the tools available at the time and was seeded by renowned Silicon Valley incubator program YCombinator. For more information about the company, Cloudant-s technology or to sign up for Cloudant-s hosting service, visit .
Cloudant disclaims any proprietary interest in the marks and names of others.
Jill Ratkevic
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