EnterpriseDB (EDB), helps organizations get the most out of PostgreSQL. Nearly 1,500 customers worldwide have chosen EDB software, services, and support. With a strong focus on building an ecosystem of innovation around Postgres, EDB is enabling partners, providing training and consulting to customers, and helping organizations in India adopt Postgres as their enterprise database standard.
Ashish Mehra, Country Head Sales, India at EnterpriseDB speaks with Zia Askari from ChannelDrive.in about the company’s core focus and its future plans.
How do you see the current market scenario? What is your Go To Market strategy in India?
We believe that 2022 is the tipping point for Postgres. Legacy systems like Oracle are no longer technically superior nor cost effective.
An inherently challenging market demands that companies accelerate their business transformation. Enterprises are shifting to open source models to compete and stay relevant, and Postgres is the option they prefer. Flexible deployment options, risk mitigation and strong security will drive even greater adoption of Postgres this year and next.
EDB’s recent majority growth investment from Bain Capital Private Equity is further validation of the growing power of Postgres. This substantial investment supports our GTM strategy which is focused on accelerating our engineering and service capabilities globally with a heavy emphasis on expanding our cloud-based technologies.
As compared to other countries, how is the Indian market different for EnterpriseDB business?
EDB is the leading brand for Postgres support in India. Our technology and expertise helps enterprises migrate and manage their mission – critical applications to Postgres. Serving more than 1,500 enterprise customers globally, EDB currently supports over 150+ customers in India with a very strong emphasis on BFSI and telecom. We also work extensively with the Central and State governments in implementing and supporting them on citizen-centric applications.
From the start, one of EDB’s focus has been to build an ecosystem of innovation around Postgres. This meant enabling partners, providing training and consulting to customers, and helping organizations in India adopt Postgres as their enterprise database standard.
Recently, EnterpriseDB has released BigAnimal on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Please brief us about the USP and its features?
Our technology approach delivers a “single database everywhere” to any platform including self-managed private clouds and self-managed public clouds, but our fully managed public cloud is the most important accelerator.
EDB BigAnimal is our fully-managed cloud database as a service (DBaaS) with built-in Oracle compatibility. With BigAnimal, we are closing the gap between what enterprises need and what cloud service
providers offer today. Other cloud vendors are data center infrastructure and hardware experts, not database specialists. This is problematic in the
eyes of enterprises. Postgres, on the other hand, is a true open source database and EDB is the largest contributor to PostgreSQL code. This enables us to deliver the same Postgres in any environment and every cloud, all managed by true Postgres database experts.
Our customers value that BigAnimal is simple to set up, manage and scale. Iconic organizations value cloud flexibility and migration flexibility, not to mention significant cost savings. Furthermore, extreme high availability means the most mission critical applications are always on, wherever and whenever our customers need them.
Serverless cloud computing is booming among small and large enterprises, can you please discuss the rise of serverless cloud computing.
As data has become a more critical asset, and the core of a business, enterprises small and large are increasingly migrating from fully on premises databases towards hybrid, and even fully managed cloud database management systems (DBMS). The fully managed database in the cloud is referred to as Database-as-a-service (DBaaS).
This form of serverless computing has the ability to provide greater flexibility and scalability, which is required for large enterprise businesses. The technology that best supports both the hybrid approach and a multi-cloud strategy is the open source database Postgres. Enterprises are also realizing the importance of data ownership and portability, and are therefore looking for options that reduce dependency on a single vendor. Once again, this is where open source databases such as Postgres offer an advantage. Organizations can run the same Postgres on any cloud platform, without vendor lock-in.
Postgres is also inherently more affordable than legacy systems and servers and its license is extremely permissive, allowing enterprise customers to use every cloud, every deployment technology, every virtualization method and every storage technology.
Enterprise industry is flocking to the cloud more than ever. What will be the future and predictions of cloud technology?
To move faster in their domain, enterprises must consider widespread adoption of serverless technology that helps to gain elastic computing
capacity, support mobile devices, reduce hardware costs and lifts the burden from IT administration. These time and cost savings are leading enterprises to readily incorporate cloud-based serverless computing. Gartner validates this point with their prediction that 75% of global databases will be on the cloud by the end of this year. While we think that’s an aggressive number, we do believe that most enterprises will at least move to a hybrid cloud environment, meaning that in the short term, some applications remain on premises, while new applications are built in the cloud.
Could you please tell us about your growth and expansion plan in India?
EDB has established itself as one of India’s largest development and support centers globally. Our objective is to continue to build and
leverage the larger community and ecosystem around Postgres so that our customers can accelerate their Postgres and business transformation without limits. We plan to continue expanding our engineering and service capabilities while supporting all functions of EDB’s backend support and technology functionality.
What are your key priorities today and how important is the Indian market for your organization?
EDB is the largest contributor to PostgreSQL code in the world and we have made a strategic commitment to maintaining that position. Our model in India is built on a hybrid approach—we work directly with our key customers while maintaining strong alliances with Global Partners and local partners to maximize our offerings.
What are your future plans (investments and hiring) for India?
For the Indian market we plan to continue growing our engineering and service capabilities, particularly with respect to our cloud-based technologies.
