 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of PostgreSQL Vision 2021, brought to you by EDB. Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We're covering PostgreSQL Vision 2021, the virtual CUBE edition. Welcome to our conversation with the CEO, Ed Boyajin is here as the CEO of Enterprise DB. And we're going to talk about what's happening in open source and database in the future of tech. Ed, welcome. Hi Dave, good to be here. Hey, several years ago at a PostgreSQL Vision event, you put forth a premise that the industry was approaching a threshold moment. A digital transformation was the linchpin of that shift. Now Ed, well you were correct and I have no doubt the audience agreed. Most people went back to their offices after that event and they returned to their hyper focus of their day to day jobs. Yeah, maybe a few accelerated their digital initiatives but generally pre COVID, we moved at a pretty incremental pace and then the big bang hit. And if you weren't digital business, you were out of business. So that single event created the most rapid change that we've ever seen in the tech industry by far, nothing really compares. So the question is, why is PostgreSQL specifically and EDB generally the right fit for this new world? Yeah, I think, look, a couple of things are happening, Dave. You know, right along the bigger picture of digital transformation, we're seeing the database market in transformation. And I think the things that are driving that shift are the things that are resulting in the success of PostgreSQL and the success of EDB. I think first and foremost, we're seeing a dramatic replatforming. And just like we saw in the world of Linux where I was at Red Hat during that shift where people were moving from UNIX based systems to X86 systems, we're seeing that similar replatforming whether that's from traditional infrastructures to cloud-based infrastructures or container-based infrastructures. That's a great opportunity for databases to be changed out. Postgres wins in that contest because it's so easily deployed anywhere. I think the second thing that's changing is we're seeing a broad expansion of developers across the enterprise. So they don't just live in IT anymore. And I think as developers take on more power and control, they're just defining the agenda. And it's another place where Postgres shines. It's been a priority of EDBs to make Postgres easier. And that's come into life. And I think the last Stack Overflow Developer Survey suggested that, I think they surveyed 65,000 developers. The second most loved and the second most used database by developers is Postgres. And so I think there again, Postgres shines in a moment of change. And then I think the third is kind of obvious. It's always an elephant in the room, no pun intended, but it's this relentless nagging burden of the expenses of the incumbent proprietary databases and the need, and we especially saw this in COVID, to start to change that, more dramatically change that economic equation. And here again, Postgres shines. You know, I want to ask you, I'm going to jump ahead to the future for a second because you're talking about the replatforming. And with your Red Hat chops, I kind of want to pick your brain on this because you're right, you saw it with Red Hat. And you're kind of seeing it again when you think about OpenShift and where it's going. My question is related to replatforming around new types of workloads, new processing models at the edge. I mean, you see an explosion of processing power, GPUs, NPUs, accelerators, DSPs, and it appears that this is happening at a very low cost. I'm inferring that you're saying, Postgres can take advantage of that trend as well, that broader replatforming trend to the edge. Is that correct? It is. And I think, you know, this has been one of the, I think the most interesting things with Postgres. Now I've been here almost 13 years. So if you put that in some perspective, I've watched and participated in leading transformation in the category. You know, we've been squarely focused on Postgres. So we've got 300 engineers who worry about making Postgres better. And as you look across that landscape of time, not only has Postgres gotten more performant and more scalable, it's also proven to be the right database choice in the world of not just legacy migrations, but new application development. And I think that Stack Overflow Developer Survey is a good indicator of how developers feel about Postgres. But, you know, over that timeframe, I think if you went back to 2008 when I joined EDB, Postgres was considered a really good general purpose database. And today, I think Postgres is a great general purpose database. General purpose isn't sexy in the market, broadly speaking, but Postgres capabilities across workloads in every area is really robust. And let me just spend a second on it. We look at our customer base is deploying in what we think of as systems of record, which are the traditional ERP type apps. You know, where there's a single source of truth, you might think of ERP apps there. We look at our customers deploying in systems of engagement. And those are apps that you might think of in the context of social media style apps or websites that are backed by a database. And the third area systems of analytics where you would typically think of data warehouse style applications. Interestingly, Postgres performs well in our customer's report using us across that whole landscape of application areas. And I think that is one of Postgres hidden superpowers is that ability to reach into each area of requirement on the workload side. Yeah, and as I was alluding to before, that itself is evolving as you now inject AI into the equation, AI inferencing, and it's just a very exciting times ahead. There's no database, you know, 20 years ago was kind of boring, now it's just exploding. I want to come back to the notion of Postgres maybe talk about other database models. I mean, you mentioned that you've evolved from this system of record, you can take system engagement on structured data, et cetera, JSON, so how should we think about Postgres in relation to other databases and specifically other business models of companies that provide database services? Why is Postgres attractive? Where is it winning? Yeah, I think a couple of places. So I mean, first and foremost, at its core, Postgres is a SQL relational database, an asset-compliant SQL relational database, and that is inherently a strength of Postgres, but it's also a multi-model database, which means we handle a lot of other database requirements, whether that's geospatial or JSON for documents or time series, things like that. And so Postgres extensibility is one of its inherent strengths, and that's kind of been built in from the beginning of Postgres. So not surprisingly, people use Postgres across a number of workloads because at the end of the day, there's still value in having a database that's able to do more. There are a lot of important specialty databases, and I think they will remain important specialty databases, but Postgres thrives in its ability to cross over in that way. And I think that is one of the key differentiators in how we've seen the market and the business develop, and that's the breadth of workloads that Postgres succeeds in. But our growth, if you kind of measured it across vectors, we see growth happening in a few dimensions. First, we see growth happening in new applications, about half of our customers that come to us today for new Postgres users are deploying us on new applications. The others are our second area migrating away from some existing legacy company, often Oracle, not always. The third area of growth we see is in cloud where Postgres is deployed very prolifically, both in the traditional cloud platforms like EC2, but then again also in the database as a service environment. And then the fourth area of growth we're seeing now is around container deployment, Kubernetes deployment. Well, Oracle is prominent because it's a big install base and it's expensive and people, they've got to look at them. It's funny, I've done a lot of TCO work and mostly, usually TCO is about labor costs. When it comes to Oracle, it's about license costs and maintenance costs. And so to the extent that you can reduce that, at least for a portion of your state, you're going to drop right to the bottom line. But I want to ask you about kind of that spectrum, if you think about the prevailing models for database, you've got on the one hand, you've got the right tool for the right job approach. It might be 10 or 12 data stores in the cloud. On the other hand, you've got kind of a converged approach. Oracle's going that direction, clearly Postgres with its open source innovation is going that direction. And it seems to me Ed that at scale, that's a more, the latter is a more cost effective model. How do you think about that? Well, I think at the end of the day, you kind of have to look at it. I mean, the business side of my brain looks at that as an addressable market question. You've heard me talk about three broad categories of workloads and people define workloads in different buckets, but that's how we do it. But if you look at just the system of record and the system of engagement market, I think that's what would be traditionally viewed as the database market. And there that's, let's just say for the sake of arguments a 45 to $50 billion market. The third, the systems of analysis, that market's an $18 billion market. And as we talk about that, so all in it's still between $60 and $70 billion market. And I think what happens, there's so much heat and light poured on the valuation multiples of some of the specialty players that the market gets confused. But the reality is our customers don't get confused. I mean, if you look at those specialty players, take that $48 billion market, I mean, ADAP, Mongo, Redis, Cockroach, Neo, all of those, I mean, hugely valued companies, all unicorn companies, but combined to add up to a billion bucks. Don't get me wrong. That's important revenue and meaningful in the workloads they support, but it's not, it doesn't define the full transformation of this category. Look at the systems of analysis. Again, another great market example. I mean, if you add up the consolidation of the Hadoop vendors, add in their snowflake, you're still talking a billion five in revenue and an $18 billion market. So while those are all important technologies, the question is in this transformation move did the database market fully transform yet? And my view is no, it didn't. We're in the first maybe second inning of a $65 billion transformation. And I think this is where Postgres will ultimately shine. I think this is how Postgres wins because at the end of the day, the nature of the workloads fits with Postgres and the future tech that we're building in Postgres will serve that broader set of needs, I think more effectively. Well, and I love these TAM expansion discussions because I think you're right on. And I think it comes back to the data. And we all talk about the data growth, the data explosion, we see the IDC numbers, we ain't seen nothing yet. And so data by its very nature is distributed. That's why I get so excited about these new platform models. And I want to tie it back to developers and open source because to me that is the linchpin of innovation in the next decade. It has been, I would even say for the last decade we've seen it, but it's gaining momentum. So in thinking about innovation and specifically Postgres and open source, what can you share with us in terms of how we should think about your advantage? And again, where people are leaning in to that advantage? Yeah, so I mean, I think you bring up a really important topic for us as a company, Postgres we think is an incredibly powerful community. And when you step away from it, again, now you remember I told you I was at Red Hat before now here at EDB, and there's a common thread that runs through those two experiences. And in both experiences, the companies are attached and prominent alongside a strong independent open source community. And I think the notion of an independent community is really important to understand around Postgres. There are hundreds and thousands of people contributing to Postgres. Now, EDB plays a big role in that about approaching a third of the contributions in the last release, release 13 of Postgres came from EDB. Now you might look at that and say, gee, that sounds like a lot. But if you step away from it, at about 30% of those contributions, most of the contributions come from a universe around EDB. And that's inherently healthy for the community's ability to innovate and accelerate. And I think that while we play a strong role there, you can imagine that having, and there are other great companies that are contributing to Postgres. I think having those companies participating and contributing gets the best ideas to the front in innovation. So I think the inherent nature of Postgres community makes it strong and healthy. And then contrast that to some of the other prominent high value open source companies. The companies and the communities are intimately intertwined. They're one and the same. They're actually not independent open source communities. And I think that there in lies one of the inherent weaknesses in those. But Postgres thrives because, we bring all those ideas from EDB. We bring a commercial contingent with us. And all the things we emphasize and focus on in growth in Postgres, whether that's in the areas of scalability, manageability, all hot topics, of course security, all of those areas, and then performance as always, all of those areas are informed to us by enterprise customers deploying Postgres at scale. And I think that's the heart of what makes a successful independent project. The combinatorial powers of that ecosystem, they're multiplicative as opposed to the resources of one. I want to talk about Postgres vision 2021, sort of set up that a little bit. The theme this year is the future is you. What do you mean by that? So if you think about what we just said, post the category is in trend, the database categories in transformation. And we know that many of our people who are interested in Postgres are early in their journey. They're early in their experience. And so we want to focus this year's Postgres vision on them that we understand as a company who's been committed to Postgres as long as we have. And with the understanding we have of the technology and best practices, we want to share that view, those insights with those who are coming to Postgres, some for the first time, some who are experienced. Postgres vision 21 is June 22nd and 23rd. Go to enterprisedb.com and register. The cube's going to be there. We hope you will be too. Ed, thanks for coming on theCUBE and previewing the event. Thanks, Dave. And thank you. We'll see you at vision 21.