EnterpriseDB, known for its products based on the open-source Postgres database, today announced that it has named Ed Boyajian, former Red Hat vice president and general manager of North American sales, as president, and chief executive, and board member.
Current CEO Andy Astor will take on the global business development role and focus on building out new markets.
Congrats to EnterpriseDB for scoring such a high-profile executive and to Ed on his new role.
IBM, a fan of many open-source projects, has taken a minority stake in EnterpriseDB, an open-source database that competes with Oracle and MySQL.
On Tuesday, EnterpriseDB is scheduled to announce a $10 million round of funding, with IBM taking a minority stake in the company. Existing investors Charles River Ventures, Fidelity Ventures, and Valhalla Partners led the round.
The money will be used to ramp up the company's product development and sales, according to EnterpriseDB CEO Andy Astor. Altogether, the 4-year-old company has raised $37.5 million.
EnterpriseDB makes a version of open-source database PostgreSQL that is compatible with Oracle's flagship database. The company sells it as a cheaper yet still industrial-strength alternative to Oracle and as a more robust offering than MySQL, a popular open-source database. Sun Microsystems bought MySQL for $1 billion earlier this year.
The funding highlights the viability of open-source databases in business--EnterpriseDB now has more than 200 customers and anticipates being profitable within a year, Astor said.
IBM's investment, which is somewhat unusual, signals where it sees competitive pressure.
Faced with open-source competitors to its own DB2 database, IBM in 2006 introduced a free, low-and version of DB2, although it does not publish the code publicly. Among closed-source incumbents, Oracle remains the database market leader.
IBM invested $50 million in Novell in 2003 and has made clear that it wants more than one provider of Linux support to businesses. Big Blue has bought dozens of software companies but nearly all, except open-source application server company Gluecode, are closed-source commercial companies.
Also on Tuesday, EnterpriseDB is expected to announce refreshes to its product lines, an announcement timed with the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco.
The newly named Postgres Plus is the open-source edition of the company's product which now includes a module specifically tuned for business intelligence applications.
The high-and commercial version, called Postgres Plus Advanced Server, is now on the same code base, which means people can more easily upgrade from Postgres Plus, Astor said.
He said that the main difference between the two versions is the Oracle compatibility included in Postgres Plus Advanced Server.
EnterpriseDB has ported its Oracle-compatible PostgreSQL database to a new platform: Amazon.com's hosted compute cloud.
The company on Tuesday started taking invitations for a beta program for EnterpriseDB Cloud Edition that will launch in March. The final product should be available this summer, according to EnterpriseDB Chief Technology Officer Bob Zurek, who spearheaded the initiative.
Amazon already offers a hosted database, called SimpleDB, but Zurek said that its database is designed for transactions and industrial-strength applications.
The service works with clustering software from Elastra, which means that servers and storage are quickly brought online to meet changes in computing demand, he explained. It taps into Amazon's Web services for hosted servers and storage, called Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).
EnterpriseDB has not announced pricing, but the company is looking at usage models in which customers pay for use of the database by the hour or by the month.
Potential customers are either enterprises that have custom applications that run on EntrerpriseDB or Web 2.0 start-ups that only want to pay for computing power as needed, Zurek said. He said tests show that application performance over the Internet does not degrade substantially.
He argued that the offering will make EnterpriseDB more competitive against MySQL, the leading open-source database provider which is widely used by Web companies. MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems for $1 billion earlier this month.
There's no phone number on the PostgreSQL.org open-source database Web site. And for EnterpriseDB CEO Andy Astor, whose company makes money from a Postgres-based product, that's been a problem.
On Tuesday, Astor's company launched a site called the EnterpriseDB Postgres Resource Center, which gives interested parties a phone number to call and, Astor hopes, other useful items.
The site's launch coincides with this week's LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco and includes a package of software tools meant to make it easier for business customers to install the open-source database. The site also offers technical information to developers.
The software package includes the Postgres database, along with a multi-operating system installer, administration tools and a text search add-on. Enterprise DB intends to offer support, training and installation services around the database.
The larger hope in setting up the site and database bundle is to create more critical mass around Postgres, Astor said.
Postgres is an enterprise-class database, but it faces competition from other database alternatives, both open-source and proprietary.
The new Web site "creates a center around which the market can develop and drive adoption of Postgres, which frankly has been slow to develop because there is nobody at the center. This is us trying to create a center," said Astor. "We hope it will become the de facto open-source database distribution."
EnterpriseDB Advanced Server, which is built on top of Postgres, will remain a separate product from the open-source distribution available on the site.
Iselin, N.J.-based EnterpriseDB has signed on about 125 customers that have bought EntepriseDB Advanced Server as a replacement for Oracle. The company has built compatibility with Oracle, the most widely used corporate database, and sells it as a enterprise-grade alternative at a fraction of the cost, according to Astor.
EnterpriseDB on Tuesday also extended its product line with a version of its database tuned specifically for large databases used in business intelligence applications.
Called GridSQL fpr EnterpriseDB Advanced Server, the product is designed for analyzing large amounts of data across several parallel servers.
Another open-source company called Greenplum has also developed a specialized edition of Postgres for high-end business business intelligence applications.
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