EnterpriseDB Expands Executive Ranks with Database Industry Veteran Kenneth Rugg

Date -2017-10-02 Location - BEDFORD, Mass. EnterpriseDB® (EDB™), the database platform company for digital business, today announced that Kenneth Rugg, founder and former Chief Executive Officer of Tesora, Inc., has joined the executive leadership team of EDB. Rugg will be Chief Product and Strategy Officer, and will report to Ed Boyajian, President and CEO, EnterpriseDB.

“EDB has grown from being the leader in enterprise Postgres to becoming the company of choice for organizations using Postgres based solutions as a centerpiece in their strategic digital initiatives,” said Boyajian. “Ken combines both business and technology expertise along with a deep understanding of databases, cloud and product strategy. He will play a central role in driving our product vision forward particularly as we expand the footprint of EDB Postgres with enterprise deployments, with developers and in the cloud."

Rugg founded Tesora, Inc., originally named ParElastic, in 2010. The company, acquired by Stratoscale in February 2017, was a database as a service (DBaaS) platform on OpenStack that was built with the open source technology Trove. Tesora’s DBaaS platform managed multiple cloud databases across the infrastructure. The product was originally proprietary, however Rugg engineered a major directional shift for the company toward open source in response to customer demand. The product was rebuilt with OpenStack Trove and Tesora ultimately became one of the leading contributors to the Trove open source project while also securing 13 technology patents.

With his experience at Tesora, Rugg became adept at managing the dual challenges of participating in an open source project while delivering commercial products that meet customer requirements. Rugg will draw from this experience as he contributes to the strategic direction of EDB. EnterpriseDB occupies a leading position in contributing technology advances to the Postgres open source code base, and develops proprietary enterprise enhancements that support more complex digital applications and infrastructures. Rugg also brings to EDB valuable experience and insight into the growing area of cloud databases. EDB offers the EDB Postgres Ark DBaaS as well as a cloud database offering on several public infrastructures.

Rugg is a veteran of the software and database industries, having started out as a software engineer in the 1980s after attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before founding Tesora, Rugg held multiple senior executive posts at Progress Software Corp. over a six-year period. He joined Progress through an acquisition of Object Design, the maker of ObjectStore, where he had been an executive for 11 years. 

“EDB aligns with my background in object relational databases, open source, and expanding cloud practices,” said Rugg. “I have worked with customers facing the challenges of digital transformation and understand the importance of what EDB offers to enable use of Postgres for enterprise applications. EDB occupies a critical intersection in the data center and I am excited to help lead the company’s growth.”