EnterpriseDB is 10 years old this year and we marked this milestone with a record 70 percent increase in subscription revenue growth. In fact, the fourth quarter of 2013 was the 16th consecutive quarter of growth in subscription revenue for the company. That’s four years of steady growth as Postgres gained greater following among enterprises, governments and other organizations.
Our team has grown as well and we've expanded worldwide. We’ve amassed an awe-inspiring depth of talent and breadth of experience and it's an honor to work each day with such great people. All of them have contributed so significantly to our dramatic expansion.
EDB added 400 new customers in 2013 so the count now stands at more than 2,400, including 50 of the Fortune 500 and 98 of the Forbes Global 2000. Worldwide, these customers now include ABN AMRO Bank, Grupo BBVA, Deutsche Börse AG, Ericsson, Fujitsu, KT Corp., Lockheed Martin, McKesson Corp., Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. (NTT), RSA Security LLC, the state of Alaska Department of Health and Human Services and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Acceptance of Postgres crosses all industries and all continents.
But the success of EDB also reflects the success of a subscription-driven business model for enterprise software. This is quite different from the licensing models employed by our proprietary database competitors. By including support, updates and all upgrades as a part of the subscription, EDB provides users with a predictable expense model without the big license fees and service charges. One Oracle license, for example, lists at $47,500 per core but support and operating costs add an additional 22% of the license costs. Even with Oracle’s famous discounting, EDB comes in at a fraction of the cost and our numbers show organizations are making the change.
Growth Curve
The trajectory of EDB has been like many enterprise software companies. The first years emphasized product development and EDB’s founding technologists built terrific software that emphasized Oracle compatibility to help companies deploy PostgreSQL.
EDB then expanded its solution set to include enterprise-class tools for manageability, high availability, replication and scalability. The company began investing in customer-driven features to complement the community’s development of PostgreSQL and released a cloud product, Postgres Plus Cloud Database. We inked meaningful partnerships with companies like HP, IBM and Red Hat.
These efforts all paid off in 2013, with the following highlights:
- Continued core subscription business growth of 70% over 2012 (a stellar growth year in it’s own right).
- A 200% increase in Postgres Plus Cloud Database revenue as companies further expanded their use of cloud computing.
- Deepened our partnership with IBM with their launch of PowerLinux with EDB as lead partner.
- Recognition from partner HP with the honor of an HP AllianceOne Partner of the Year for Mission-critical Computing for new customer Deutsche Börse.
Product Advances
Last year also marked a major turning point for PostgreSQL and our flagship Postgres Plus Advanced Server. The PostgreSQL community continued to stretch the reach of PostgreSQL to meet the demands of users, expanding JSON support for example. Building on the advances from the community, EDB developed major performance enhancements for Postgres that dramatically increased the range of workloads that Postgres Plus now runs at our enterprise customers.
Among the important product releases in 2013 and their key features were:
- Postgres Plus Advanced Server 9.3
- Major performance improvements with new partitioning enhancements that can scale to thousands of tables
- Materialized views
- Expanded JSON support with new parser and operators
- 10th generation Oracle Compatibility with new package support and loader
- Postgres Enterprise Manager 4.0
- Customizable dashboards
- New monitoring probes and alerts
- EDB Failover Manager – New Product
- Fulfilled a need in the market for an enterprise-class Postgres High Availability solution
Postgres technology advances and adoption have surged to entirely new levels in the last three years. Enterprises are transforming their legacy database spending by extending their use of Postgres as the open source database-of-choice for new workloads and replacing unnecessary spend on their legacy database vendors. With expanded performance and manageability and support for new data types like JSON to enable extraordinary big data and NoSQL-like functionality, Postgres momentum continues to build and with it, so is EDB’s.
For more detail about our record-shattering 2013, read our release: http://bit.ly/NUvm9j
Ed Boyajian is CEO and president of EnterpriseDB.