Broadening its definition of the cloud, IBM is moving beyond Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) as part of an ambitious push to capture a larger slice of the burgeoning enterprise cloud market. But unlike the retail giant, Big Blue has decided to take the inorganic route and buy out firms with established offerings, a strategy that allowed it to secure a dominant position in the Big Data market. The company is hoping to replicate its success with the newly announced acquisition of Cloudant, a Boston-based provider of hosted NoSQL solutions.

While unexpected, the deal doesn’t come as too big of a surprise. Cloudant runs its distribution of the Apache CouchDB document database on infrastructure operated by SoftLayer, the IaaS vendor IBM picked up last September for $2 billion. Seven months later, the technology juggernaut allocated a massive $1.2 billion to opening 15 new data centers for a total of 40 by 2015. The transaction, the terms of which were not disclosed, will help Big Blue take advantage of its fast-expanding footprint to gain ground against Amazon.

Cloudant’s JSON-based service is especially popular among mobile developers, a segment that has been somewhat neglected by the major cloud providers but prioritized by IBM in its plans to make data insights more accessible to end users. Les Rechan, the head of the company’s business analytics group, explained on theCUBE that smartphones and tablets are key to achieving that goal, and it’s been an ongoing topic during this week’s IBM Pulse event, where theCUBE is broadcasting live, exclusive interviews on SiliconANGLE.tv.

“When you think about analytics (social, mobile, cloud), we’re looking at systems of engagement, presenting information to people on the front line that could come from many heterogeneous data sources. We want to be able to bring that together – and we have solutions that do that – and then bring it together for that user and for that particular problem,” Rechan said.

The acquisition of Cloudant is set to close later this quarter, at which point it will be integrated into IBM’s recently formed Information and Analytics Group. The unit is led by Bob Picciano and operates under the vendor’s software and systems business.