In late April, EDB hosted a Partner Academy in Madrid focused on one goal: making sure our partners have what they need to support customers through some of the hardest architectural decisions they’re facing right now.
What stood out most was the pattern across conversations. Everyone in the room was seeing versions of the same thing: customers working through modernization efforts that don’t follow a clean playbook, balancing cloud expansion with a growing need for visibility, and starting to ask sharper questions about how AI fits into all of it without compromising control.
What We Covered and Why It Mattered
The discussions in Madrid mapped directly to what partners are hearing from customers across financial services, telecom, and government—especially when the conversation turns from cost to control, from database performance to long-term data and AI strategy.
Postgres is winning on more than cost
One of the clearest messages throughout the day: enterprises aren’t switching to Postgres just to save money anymore. They’re switching because they need more flexibility, better performance, and less vendor friction. In particular, customers are starting to look for platforms that support multiple workload types (OLTP, analytics, AI) in one place without handing over ownership of their data. EDB Postgres AI is designed to meet that moment as a single, open platform that runs across environments and supports modern use cases without lock-in.
Sovereignty is moving from principle to requirement
It came up repeatedly: sovereignty is no longer a philosophical stance; it’s rapidly becoming an operational constraint. Whether it’s sector-specific compliance, national cloud mandates, or internal governance policies, customers are under pressure to retain full control over where their data resides, how it moves, and who can see it. Partners in Madrid were especially engaged in conversations around how EDB’s hybrid control plane, vector search, and AI integrations can be deployed in sovereign contexts without breaking the architecture or delaying delivery.
Modernization means meeting customers where they are
Oracle migration is still a huge opportunity, but it must be approached with realism. Many customers are ready to move, but their applications aren’t. Partners shared examples of legacy stacks that can’t be replatformed all at once, compliance teams asking for extensive audits, and execs looking for staged approaches that reduce risk. The conversation shifted from “how to win Oracle replacements” to “how to help teams modernize incrementally, with support at each step.” That’s where tools like the Migration Portal and compatibility layer are most effective when paired with a strategy that takes the full environment into account.
AI interest is growing, but the architecture still needs clarity
There’s no shortage of enthusiasm around GenAI, but there’s also a growing awareness that many proposed solutions come with tradeoffs customers aren’t willing to make. Partners dug into questions like: How do we support AI workloads without sending sensitive data to someone else’s inference engine? What’s the right role for embedded models? How do we stay flexible while still meeting security and observability requirements? Demos around EDB Postgres AI and Griptape sparked good conversation here, especially for partners looking to lead in public sector or financial services.
Observability and control are becoming real differentiators
Across nearly every discussion, one theme kept resurfacing: customers don’t just want functionality; they want control. As database deployments become more fragmented, with workloads split across clouds, regions, and platforms, the need for unified visibility and robust governance is growing fast. EDB’s hybrid control plane landed well because it gives partners a clear answer to that question—shared monitoring, consistent policy enforcement, and simplified ops, no matter where the workload lives.
Where We Go From Here
The Madrid Partner Academy reflected what many of us already knew: the role of the partner is changing. It’s not about reselling. It’s about solving real architectural problems with customers who are increasingly constrained by legacy systems, regulatory pressure, and AI expectations that move faster than infrastructure.
Partner enablement can’t be generic. It has to be practical, region-specific, and tuned to what’s actually happening in the field. That’s what these sessions are for and why we’re continuing them across EMEA, with upcoming stops in Milan, Paris, and beyond.
Thank you to everyone who joined us in Madrid and to those already shaping the conversations to come.