Cloudant is a hosted, managed, distributed database as a service. We're based on CouchDB, but then added clustering, then full-text search, and -- coming soon -- geo-indexing :D

BigCouch, and the clustering abilities that we're merging back into CouchDB, are open-source artifacts of the work we do on the core product. The open-source community gave us so much, and we love giving back :D

Ah, thanks for clarifying!

And I think it's great that BigCouch is being merged back into CouchDB. I'm just getting interested in CouchDB and PouchDB and it seems these projects deserve the love.