IBM Becomes One of Four Investors in EnterpriseDB

IBM has decided to invest in the startup that commercializes PostgreSQL database, EnterpriseDB. This comes at about four weeks after the lock up of the open source MySQL database system by Sun Microsystems. This way, IBM joins Charles River Ventures, Fidelity Ventures, and Valhalla Partners in investing in EnterpriseDB. This move comes as a surprise for some, as IBM does not usually invest in startups. Although it has a Venture Capital Group, its job is only to watch for promising startups and to recommend which companies are the best acquisition targets.

Additionally, EnterpriseDB announced $10 million more in venture capital financing, although no details of IBM's share in financing the startup were given. The only comment that Andy Astor, CEO of EnterpriseDB, gave was that IBM "took a minority role in the C series." According to Astor, IMB sees the company as an enterprise ready. This is the first time when IBM invests in a commercial company, although there were some other forms of open source support in the past. One of them, valued at $40 million by IBM, was the development of the Eclipse programmer's workbench that ended in being donated as open source.

IBM "has a long history of supporting open source initiatives, including Linux, Apache, and Eclipse," as Inna Kuznetsova, director of IBM's Linux strategy, said in a statement. On the other hand, applications written for Oracle, IBM's main competitor in what regards database market, need little modification to run on EnterpriseDB. As the startup is the only "Oracle-compatible" database on the market, according to Astor, IBM's interest in the matter is easy to view. FTD Florists is an example of a firm that used EnterpriseDB to displace its Oracle database reporting systems.

Venture capital funding has garnered EnterpriseDB with a total of $37.5 million. An employed database architect is Bruce Momjian, the lead integrator of the PostgreSQL open source project. The team has other noticeable members as well. Some of them were on the PostgreSQL project too. Heikki Linnakangas and Pavan Deolasee were brought in to the company last year, while four other database programmers were employed in the past.

The recent releases of the PostgreSQL community ensure ANSI standard SQL compliance, as well as enhanced transaction throughput performance. Some other open source databases omitted these, so they are considered to be enterprise operational qualities.