Developers will soon have another strong reason to build their services on IBM Corp.’s public thanks to its newly announced acquisition of a startup called called Composite Inc. that has carved out a respectable niche for itself automating the deployment of modern databases. While that’s only one of the many priorities in a software project, it’s among the most important on the entire checklist.

Information technology, after all, revolves around data, the management of which can be immensely complex in accordance with its importance. Merely keeping up with the natural evolution of capacity and processing requirements poses a major logistical problem, but that challenge still pales in comparison to the accumulated difficulty of all the other chores involved in maintaining a large-scale database.

Compose has spent the last five years of its existence automating that heavy lifting for developers with its namesake cloud service, which offers managed implementations of popular open-source data stores such as MongoDB and PostgreSQL along with complementary projects like Elasticsearch. Its value proposition consists of all the usual features that an organization would expect out of a production-grade database deployment.

That includes predictable performance, redundancy of the underlying infrastructure and an array of data protection functions including backup and failover. On top of that, Compose also has a homegrown migration tool that enables developers to move information among systems hosted on its platform with relative ease.

That functionality will help bolster IBM’s existing selection of automation services, which are aimed at the same goal of minimizing the amount of operational work that developers need to perform in order to get their applications up and running on its platform. The lower the entry point, the broader the appeal, or at least so the company hopes.

The simplicity of Compose is only one of the reasons behind IBM’s decision to swoop in, however. The fact that the startup specifically focuses on open-source databases is another major driver behind the purchase that underscores the company’s aggressive  efforts to move beyond its proprietary past. Chief executive Meg Whitman is sparing no expense on the transition, having recently committed a billion dollars and 4,500 engineers to help accelerate the development of Apache Spark.

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