Walled Gardens or Beautiful Fields: A Model to Become Truly Digital

Think about the old days. Infrastructure software was deployed and managed on a “per server” basis. Later that moved to the socket, and then to the core, and then to the virtual core. Well, guess what? Today, people want to deploy technology in even smaller increments. For example in containerized packages over shorter periods of time across vast landscapes of infrastructure. In this new reality, the business and technology models have to adapt in order for organizations to effectively realize their digital goals.

At EDB, we see our customers leading with digital initiatives to create business advantages for their companies. For this reason, we actively work with our customers in a number of important ways to enable their digital initiatives. At the core is to give them the technology they need to enable innovation to take place. Second, and most importantly, is the way our technology is able to interoperate in the context of our customers’ unique environments.

Here is a comparison to help illustrate the point. In the world of legacy technology, we often see enterprise organizations who have built extensive “walled gardens” of technology that are heavily vendor specific. Organizations that adopt these vendor-specific technologies are able to innovate only to the extent that the vendor innovates and brings new capabilities to their technology and business models. So, there is an incredible amount of inherent limitation built inside these walled technology gardens. Organizations find themselves at the mercy of their vendors, playing a technology waiting game and restricted within the confines of these contractual walls.

Conversely, with EDB Postgres, the foundation of our approach is to build technologies and capabilities that offer interoperability, flexibility, and greater control for enterprise customers. For companies embracing digital transformation, there's a strong fit between what we do with EDB Postgres and what they do with their innovation initiatives. Not only do we bring core technology that meets the requirements for database and data management, but we also add things to EDB Postgres that allow organizations to deploy EDB as the critical point of leverage in the new world that relies on polyglot data persistence. By doing that, we are helping our customers to innovate and to fully engage in digital transformation.

Some examples of those technologies include the work we do with foreign data wrappers and with the multi-model capabilities of our database. EDB Postgres can interoperate seamlessly in an application environment that might also depend on MySQL, MongoDB, Hadoop, legacy proprietary databases like Oracle or a data warehouse. The focus of our product work is to help our customers build bridges instead of walls. Not only do we offer the kind of traditional SQL relational capabilities that are inherent in Postgres, but now Postgres embraces both the NoSQL world with JSONB, and works seamlessly with HDFS environments. In the core technology, we're giving our customers flexibility to expand outside of the traditional constraints they have with their proprietary vendors.

And, the last place that we enable digital transformation for our customers is through the use of appropriate business arrangements that allow them to deploy technology flexibly at far lower cost than traditional vendors. We have woven all of these things together, not only in the EDB Postgres platform, but the ecosystem of capabilities we support and the business arrangements we provide.

In the age of digital transformation, laggards will be out-competed. You can’t afford to wait and see. It is time to tear down the walls and enjoy the type of interoperability and flexibility that stimulates innovation.

Ed Boyajian is President and CEO of EnterpriseDB.