NoSQL Companies CouchOne And Membase Merge To Form Couchbase
NoSQL companies unite! Membase (formerly NorthScale) and CouchOne have decided to merge to form Couchbase, which will provide a comprehensive family of NoSQL (which focuses on adding horizontal scalability to databases) database products for enterprise companies.
Context & Ripple Effects
Both sides of this deal are young commercial-open-source bets on the same thesis: that enterprises want horizontally scalable databases outside the relational world, and will pay a vendor for support around them. Membase reached the table as a rebrand — it was previously known as NorthScale — while CouchOne carried the CouchDB document-store lineage, so the merger pairs a caching/key-value product with a document database under one roof.
First-order effects
- Couchbase immediately fields a broader product family than either founder company could alone: Membase's key-value caching alongside CouchOne's document database, sold as one enterprise NoSQL offering.
- Existing customers of each startup now have a single vendor relationship covering both access patterns, and the combined company inherits both brands' developer communities.
Second-order effects
- Rival NoSQL startups competing for the same early-enterprise deployments now face a competitor that can pitch caching plus persistence in one contract, raising the bar on scope for anyone still selling a single data model.
- Enterprise buyers evaluating non-relational databases get fewer, larger vendors to choose between, which pushes procurement conversations toward consolidated platforms rather than best-of-breed picks.
Third-order effects
- If this pattern holds, the fragmented field of NoSQL projects commercialized by small venture-backed shops consolidates into a handful of multi-product platform vendors, with M&A doing what individual products could not.
- The merger also signals that open-source database projects treat commercial scale — not community adoption alone — as the endgame, a template other project-backed startups in this space will be pressured to follow.
The trend: The NoSQL wave of startups is entering its consolidation phase, merging to package horizontally scalable databases into full product families for enterprise buyers.