Cloudant, “the data layer as a service” company that offers hosting for  CouchDB databases, in addition to a fork of the latter called BigCouch, announced the latest member of its board. Andy Palmer, known mostly for his role as the co-founder and CEO of Vertica up until it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard, is the newest director for Cloudant. He’ll be contributing his two decades worth of experience and insight to the IT industry to the company, which was named first on SiliconANGLE’s 5 Underdog Startups to Watch in 2012 list.

“Cloudant was founded on a brilliant premise: the data layer is something you should grow into, not out of,” said Palmer. “The unique technology behind the Cloudant data layer makes discontinuous and expensive data management infrastructure upgrades a thing of the past. But Cloudant goes beyond just continuous scaling.  With Cloudant it is much easier for developers to add innovative analytics, text search, off-line computing, geo-location and other features to their web and mobile apps.”

Palmer served on the board of several other cloud startups including CloudSwitch and Goby, in addition to a couple others. On top of that experience and his work at Vertica, he also held various management spots at companies such as Bowstreet, a web-based services provider that got a relatively early start and was eventually bought by IBM.

MongoDB is currently ahead of Couch in the NoSQL market (hence Cloudant’s underdog rating), but the latter is still an active project that, as we’ve highlighted, has a lot of potential as this area grows as a whole. Palmer has successfully realized growth visions for several firms, and will chip in to help shape Cloudant’s.

Previously, Cloudant dev Paul Davis joined the Apache CouchDB Project Management Committee, or PMC for short.