Change the Game, Together: Celebrating Our Partners at the EDB Postgres® AI Summit Seoul 2026

Korea is one of the fastest-moving open source markets I’ve seen, and it was on full display at the EDB Postgres AI Summit Seoul 2026, held on September 3 at the Grand Ballroom, Sofitel Ambassador, Seoul. The Summit’s theme, “Change the Game,” captured exactly what’s underway in the region: enterprise IT shifting from commercial, database-centric stacks toward open source and AI—what our Korean colleagues call OX, Open Source Transformation.

The scale of the response made that shift concrete. Registration reached 189% of target, 72% of attendees were new to EDB, and 93% were directly involved in purchase decisions at their organizations. Across the day’s 15 sessions, customers including Samsung Electronics, IBK (Industrial Bank of Korea), and Shopcast shared how they’re putting Postgres to work in production—real detail on modernization, analytics, and AI workloads that went well beyond a typical vendor showcase. (The full session replay and slides are available on demand for anyone who wants to go deeper.)

For me, though, the highlight of the day was a smaller room: the EDB Postgres AI Summit Partner Luncheon, themed “Accelerating Partner-Led Growth in Korea.” I was joined by Herve Timsit, EDB’s chief revenue officer; Hee Bai Kim, EDB Korea country director; and Hyun Cheol Han (Harry), who leads our partner business here in Korea, in hosting roughly 80 attendees from more than 20 partners and distributors. This included our two distributors, Eteverse and C Platform; and resellers such as TimeGate, S-Core, Dataworks, RockPlace, Infrasoft, Neoclova, Vatos, Beyond Data, 3SSoft,  and AidaRoot, among others. It’s this room, and this ecosystem, that I want to spend the rest of this post on.

Bigger TAM, bigger partner opportunity

Before the awards, Han and I talked about where the partner opportunity is headed. EDB Postgres AI now extends well beyond core transactional workloads into analytics and agentic AI, which means the addressable business for our partners is growing right alongside it. We’re backing that with real investment in partner profitability: a refreshed program with Registered, Silver, and Gold tiers plus a dedicated Distributor tier; enhanced rebates (1.25x at Gold); Give-to-Get eligibility; and MDF and co-marketing support. It’s not just us saying this is the moment, either—Forrester recently named EDB a Leader among multimodel data platforms, one of only four Leaders out of 14 suppliers evaluated, scoring highest on vision, innovation, roadmap, and partner ecosystem.

Celebrating excellence: The Korea Partner Award winners

The heart of the luncheon was recognizing seven partners who have pushed this ecosystem forward over the past year:

Congratulations to all seven. Each one represents a different way of winning in this market—through distribution muscle, customer retention, new logos, migration expertise, innovation, or analytics depth—and together they show just how deep this ecosystem has become.

Timsit put it well: “Korea is one of the most dynamic open source markets in the world, and our partners are the reason we can move at the pace we do. The opportunity in front of us is much bigger than replacing a database—it is modernizing the entire data and AI foundation of the enterprise.”

And Han framed our commitment in Korea simply: “We will create opportunities together and grow the market together, from strategy through joint opportunity development to execution in the field.”

The road ahead: From good execution to great partnership

We closed the session looking forward. In the near term, that means tighter deal registration, more joint opportunity development, active co-selling, and a regular cadence of business reviews. Beyond that, we’re building toward repeatable pipeline instead of one-off deals, new markets and use cases, stronger partner sales, technical and services capability, and real discipline around QBRs and joint business plans.

Thank you to every partner and distributor who made the trip to Seoul, and to Han and the Korea team for making this luncheon happen. The energy in that room told me everything I need to know about where this market is going, and I can’t wait to see what this ecosystem builds next.

Top: Tony Bhatti at the EDB Postgres AI Summit Partner Luncheon in Korea. Middle: Herve Timsit. Bottom: Presentation of awards.

For more on the broader Summit, EDB Postgres AI Summit Seoul 2026 received strong local coverage from Datanet, HelloT, and VentureSquare (Korean language).