Cloudant has potentially cut a new acronym on the tech landscape this month with what the company labels as the first "data layer-as-a-service" (DLaaS) for developers of big data apps and other data-driven web and mobile applications.

But hang on, isn't this just a global data center with some nice developer-friendly provisioning for application analysis and storage? Cloudant says that this is a strategically designed "global data layer network" with scalability and availability for big data and other data-driven applications that typically have a highly distributed user base.

NOTE: The endplay for Cloudant is to take dynamic, transactional data as close to the network edge as possible. If you're a developer, the company says that it's "unique" in that Cloudant takes your data and focuses on getting it around the globe closer to where application users are. This way you have more flexibility with that data and users have the lowest possible latency to access it. It's not just being developer-friendly from a provisioning standpoint — although that's important — it's about moving data closer to where users are, and Cloudant handles that on the backend automatically as a service.

Customers claim to have been able to grown their stacks by up to 20 times on the Cloudant service without changing a single line of code or hiring any database operations people. This is the kind of technology that can support data-driven application that needs to scale from thousands to millions of users overnight, across the world, while providing fast access to large datasets.

Cloudant asserts that scalability improves the overall user experience for applications, with data delivered closer to where users need it — and, crucially, it helps developers address rapid usage spikes, such as the "App Store effect."

"Organizations large and small are realizing that managing the data layer with their own resources can be technically complex, time intensive, and costly," said Cloudant CEO Schoettle. "This problem increases exponentially when you want to scale availability of that data globally. The expansion of the Cloudant data layer solves this problem and opens a new world of possibilities for developers to create the most dynamic web applications possible."