EnterpriseDB gets a little Red Hat inside
Ed Boyajian, former vice president and general manager, North American sales, Red Hat, has been named as EnterpriseDB's new president and CEO. Andy Astor will assume the role of executive vice president of Business Development at EnterpriseDB, and has no doubt breathed a huge sigh of relief at giving up the reins to Ed.
This is just one of the three new open-source CEOs I reported a few weeks back.
Savio rightly suggests that this is a positive indicator of EnterpriseDB's/PostgreSQL's health, rather than an indication of any ailment at Red Hat. Even so, I wouldn't have pegged EnterpriseDB as the place for Alex Pinchev's right-hand man to end up.
EnterpriseDB has struggled to keep pace with MySQL's brand and revenue momentum. I'm not sure this changes that. What it might do is make EnterpriseDB an interesting acquisition for Red Hat. Red Hat needs to continue to grow out its "hub-of-the-commercial-open-source-community" play, and a database is going to be critical to that.
Having missed out on MySQL, could PostgreSQL be a good back-up plan? Perhaps. But then, as perhaps JOnAS proved, buying into second place has yet to prove itself as a viable strategy in open source. First-mover advantage tends to translate into "winner takes all."
Even so, best of luck to Ed, Andy, and the EnterpriseDB team.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
