Cloud heavyweight wannabee CenturyLink Inc., which is best recognized as a telecommunications vendor, has announced the acquisition of a 10-person startup called Orchestrate, which delivers fully managed, high performance, fault tolerant NoSQL database technologies.

While CenturyLink confirmed the deal in a blog post, neither company made any mention of the terms. Nevertheless, a source familiar with the matter told VentureBeat that CenturyLink paid between $10 million and $12 million to buy out Orchestrate.

By snapping up Orchestrate, CenturyLink adds Orchestrate’s database-as-a-service (DaaS) capabilities to its CenturyLink Cloud suite, while also getting its hands on a bunch of top NoSQL talent to help with its product development. Orchestrate’s main offering is highly customized NoSQL databases designed to work with different apps, which means customers don’t need to run their own instances. Instead, its API provides access to features like full text search, geospatial, time series, graphing and key value storage.

It’s a solid piece of technology that will certainly bolster CenturyLink’s cloud offering, but it still has some way to go if its to fulfill its dream of reinventing itself as a cloud-based data services company and competing with leaders like Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft. CenturyLink definitely doesn’t lack ambition though – in recent years its snapped up Big Data analytics firm Cognilytics, data center and hosting company Savvis Inc., for $2.3 billion, as well as AppFog, a Portland-based Platform as a Service, and also Tier 3, a Seattle-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform and advanced cloud management company based on Cloud Foundry.

Those acquisitions have seen CenturyLink add plenty of new talent to its roster, and the Orchestrate gobble sees it welcome company co-founder Antony Falco, who was previously the chief technology officer and chief operating officer at Basho Technologies Inc., into its fold.

CenturyLink’s product management director Richard Seroter writes about its plans for Orchestrate at length in the following blog post, saying: “there are so many types of NoSQL databases that developers need to keep track of, and it seems like a new one emerges every day. There are dozens of database packages in the market that didn’t even exist five years ago”

Orchestrate essentially gets around this problem by using a “multi-modal database fabric” with a single API, Seroter notes. He adds that CenturyLink plans to deploy Orchestrate’s technology to its data centers in China, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and the U.K.

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