Before he became a top executive at Red Hat and then chief executive officer of EnterpriseDB Corp., Ed Boyajian was a captain in the U.S. Army and trained as an Airborne Ranger. Early in his military career, one of Boyajian’s commanders told the young lieutenant that people in the world either made things happen or let things happen, and Boyajian would have to decide which path he would choose.

In his current role at EDB, a leading contributor to PostgreSQL, Boyajian is clearly making things happen. The company reported a 59% increase in annual recurring revenue and 117% net customer expansion for 2020. EDB now has nearly a quarter of Fortune 100 companies as customers and has grown its revenue over 45 consecutive quarters.

PostgreSQL, the community developed, open-source object relational database was recognized as the 2020 Database Management System (DBMS) of the year by DB-Engines.

Both EDB and PostgreSQL are clearly breaking away from the database pack, and EDB has flatly stated that Postgres is a movement.

New apps and containers

Embracing Postgres for new application development is one of the tailwinds behind the technology’s growing popularity, according to Boyajian. The database supports the U.S. Navy, improves operations for furniture giant Ikea, and even keeps track of virtual bricks in “The Lego Movie.”

Another factor that could propel Postgres deeper in the enterprise is its ability to run on the highly popular Kubernetes container orchestration platform. In a two-part analysis published in 2018, Josh Berkus, Kubernetes community manager at Red Hat, who is presenting this month at Postgres Vision, provided a number of reasons for why running Postgres on the container tool was a good idea, balanced by a few areas where it was not. Foremost among the reasons for running a Postgres database on Kubernetes was that developers could simplify the deployment process by putting all of the application components on the tool.

“It’s always going to be harder to manage a database that has to be deployed by a completely different process from the application it supports,” Berkus noted.

Developers have been succinct in what appeals to them about Postgres. In a series of posts on Twitter late last year, Adam Jacob, CEO of The System Initiative, recognized Postgres for its stability over decades of use, ease in making the database feel custom to the domain model, and its robust ability to store or retrieve data.

Kelsey Hightower, staff developer advocate at Google Cloud Platform, added his own comment to Jacob’s analysis about Postgres. “Postgres is what happens when tech gets so good, for so long, it becomes boring,” Hightower wrote. “Dope since the ’80s.”

Partnership with IBM

What has not been boring is the level of interest among major technology players in the integration of Postgres with data management platforms. Last year, EDB signed a multi-year partnership with IBM to package and resell EDB Postgres Advanced, the company’s enterprise class PostgreSQL offering, as part of IBM’s integrated platform.

Part of the motivation for IBM’s interest in EDB is an overall desire to bring more open-source databases into its platform. A year ago, IBM indicated that it had completed the necessary work to port PostgreSQL to the IBM i operating system.

Continued synergy between Red Hat and the Postgres community is also a factor in the IBM relationship. EDB Postgres Advanced is available on IBM Cloud Pak for Data, which runs on the Red Hat OpenShift container platform.

“It puts EDB onto a platform where there is serious go-to-market resource being invested,” said Tony Baer, principal at dbInsight LLC, in an interview with SiliconANGLE. “IBM is trying to build critical mass with the hybrid cloud, and for that it needs an ecosystem. EDB helps them with that.”

Metrics such as this highlight the importance of IBM’s partnership with EDB in maintaining its presence in the increasingly competitive database field.

“We believe it’s a win-win for both,” said Noel Yuhanna, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, in an interview with SiliconANGLE. “I think IBM recognizes the fact that PostgreSQL has been gaining significant traction over the past few years; hence this partnership with EDB helps customers to leverage IBM’s broad data management capabilities. The success of this partnership is likely to depend on how aggressive their outreach will be across vertical industries and use cases and the joint marketing effort.”

Expanding cloud opportunities

The open-source nature of Postgres is fueling a new wave of innovation, lending validity to EDB’s view that it is indeed a movement. 

“Postgres started to get going when a second generation of open-source databases emerged,” Baer noted. “I consider it a movement because no single vendor owns it.”

EDB will likely continue to tailor its products to accommodate innovation happening in the cloud. Over 40% of the firm’s customers report using EDB products in the public cloud, according to recent comments by Marc Linster, chief technology officer at EDB.

The company’s product portfolio offers tools tailored for the major cloud platforms, including Cloud Native Postgres with Kubernetes Operator, which EDB will be presenting about at Postgres Vision. Linster sees a place for EDB in the cloud landscape.

“Enterprise customers understand the value of the strategic relationship,” Linster said, “especially when it comes to databases that hold the corporation’s crown jewels.”

TheCUBE will be covering the Postgres Vision 2021 event with executive, thought leader and analyst interviews on June 22 and 23. Tune in to watch our live coverage. And you can register for the online event here. (Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Postgres Vision event. Neither EnterpriseDB Corp., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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