IBM announced on Thursday that it has acquired Compose as part of its expansion plan on its cloud services. Compose is a startup company that began in 2010. First known as MongoHQ, it was the first DBaaS (database as a service) that allows application developers to easily deploy and scale data store using with backups, monitoring, performance tuning and a full suite of management tools.

"Today we are excited to announce that Compose is joining IBM. As founders, it was the biggest and most important decision we've ever had to make - much more difficult than we ever would have guessed back when we only dreamed of having a successful company. While we are profitable and growing fast, we think now is the right time to team up with a larger company," said the announcement in a blog post.

Compose will continue its operations as usual and its users will not be affected by the acquisition, an IBM spokesperson told TechCrunch. The company is currently managing 100,000 databases for 3,600 companies.

IBM is continuously searching for cloud businesses to acquire in order to keep its stance in the cloud services market, especially since it has Amazon, Google, and Microsoft as its competition. The news came as a surprise after IBM reported earlier this week that its second-quarter sales declined, marking the 13th straight period of falling revenue.

"Compose's breadth of database offerings will expand IBM's Bluemix platform for the many app developers seeking production-ready databases built on open source," Derek Schoettle, general manager of IBM Cloud Data Services and former CEO of Cloudant, said to eWeek. "Compose furthers IBM's commitment to ensuring developers have access to the right tools for the job by offering the broadest set of DBaaS services and the flexibility of hybrid cloud deployment."

The price and terms of the acquisition deal were not disclosed.