The cloud has a history of systematically entering entrenched markets and upending them, displacing legacy providers as they fail to compete on ease of use, flexibility, scalability, and pricing. Compute and storage experienced this very cloud disruption over the past decade as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have released and continued to improve on their public cloud offerings. Companies like IBM, Dell, and HP have struggled to maintain pace with the constantly innovating and iterating public cloud providers.

In this transition from on-premises to cloud computing, enterprises are faced with a fair amount of top down pressure to adopt a cloud strategy, however deep entanglements with existing investments in legacy infrastructure and concerns with storing data outside of their firewalls have led to a slower rate of adoption than that of smaller, more agile businesses. Databases are no exception to this rule. Many enterprises have remained wedded to their legacy databases despite being hamstrung on price, functionality, and other features.

Those businesses that have remained with their legacy databases are not doing so due to a lack of options. In the last 15 years the number of databases has proliferated, with each offering its own, unique approach to tagging, storing, and querying data. When selecting a database, businesses first need to decide between relational and non-relational, then open-source and proprietary, and finally from a plethora of options thereafter.

Despite the obvious benefits of rejuvenating their legacy databases, some enterprises choose not to do so, primarily because of a perceived lack of functionality and concern that bringing their databases in-house would lack the support provided when licensing third party, proprietary databases. In response to these concerns, database management systems have answered the call and are bridging the gap between a new, more agile breed of databases and the enterprise-grade functionality and support required by those contemplating a database upgrade.

With these dynamics in mind, Catalyst is excited to announce our investment, alongside Great Hill Partners, in EnterpriseDB, an enterprise-grade database management system based on PostgreSQL (“Postgres”), a relational, open-source database. In the midst of this generational shift from legacy, proprietary databases to open-source, infrastructure-agnostic databases, EnterpriseDB serves as the connective tissue that will provide businesses with enough confidence to make the inevitable switch towards a more flexible database strategy.

Open-source databases have been steadily increasing in popularity as users are realizing the inherent benefits of taking the community-driven approach towards innovation and shedding the expensive licensing fees associated with proprietary databases. Riding the tailwinds of these market trends, Postgres has quickly become the most popular relational, open-source database. It is a technically advanced, versatile, and mature open-source database, enabling customers to support a wide range of workloads with a great deal of deployment flexibility from on-premise to cloud-native environments to private clouds with containers.

One inherent risk in riding the wave of cloud migration is running into the large public cloud providers (AWS, Azure, etc.) and finding yourself inevitably outmatched in terms of resources and breadth of offerings. However, within relational databases, we believe there are a number of headwinds working against these public cloud providers that EnterpriseDB and other independents stand to benefit from. First, businesses already using these providers for other services want to avoid vendor lock-in that would subject them to the same pressures exerted on them by their legacy database providers. Additionally, public cloud providers typically offer either a lower level of support or outsource it, which allows independents to differentiate themselves through high-quality support, one of the key business concerns associated with migrating databases. Finally, customers looking to deploy complex databases across multiple infrastructures or adopt a multi-cloud strategy will seek third party databases to provide them with not only greater deployment flexibility but also the ability to tune the databases to their specific needs.

EnterpriseDB is positioned to accelerate this generational enterprise cloud migration movement by offering access to the community-driven innovation and technical progressiveness of open-source databases accompanied by the level of functionality, sophistication, and support demanded by many businesses today.