Around this time last year, Gartner named Percona a Challenger in the 2015 Magic Quadrant for Operational Database Management Systems (Gartner Operational DBMS MQ). For those not familiar with these, Magic Quadrants (MQ) are a set of market research reports published by Gartner that provide qualitative analysis into a market by highlighting its participants, relevant trends, and overall depth.
While we were excited with our first placement in the Gartner MQ, Percona elected to be excluded in the 2016 Gartner Operational DBMS MQ due to changes in the inclusion criteria this year, one of which was an emphasis on venture capital funding.
While many of the companies featured in the MQ provide open source software, they also sell proprietary or open core versions of their software. Open source companies are formed as an alternative to commercial software companies. To a company backed by investors, and a board of directors looking to maximize revenue and market capitalization, open core or business source licenses (BSL) are an attractive prospect. However, the reasons for moving to a monetized-software model misses the point of open source companies.
At Percona we ship all our software as open source, and make it easily accessible to everyone. We have been doing it the “hard” way for the last 10 years, by avoiding the entanglements of venture capital. This gives us the freedom to plan reasonable and achievable growth rates without sacrificing our open source ideals.
Percona will continue to focus on what we think is important to our customers, our users and the open source database market as whole:
- We are committed to remaining the unbiased champions of open source database solutions by providing our customers and the market with the best solutions to meet their needs
- We are proud of our 10-year anniversary as a bootstrapped open source company, and will continue to celebrate this achievement through the remaining months of 2016
- We will continue to provide open source technical expertise and thought leadership on our blog and webinars, participate in industry events and host the Percona Live Open Source Database Conferences.
Our model at Percona is keeping our enterprise-grade software, such as Percona Server for MySQL, Percona Server for MongoDB, Percona XtraDB Cluster and Percona Xtrabackup, completely open source and free. Our commitment to open source remains attractive to our customers because it prevents vendor lock-in. And being a successful open source company means prioritizing the value of your customer solutions over selling software. We pair our products with great services, such as Support for MySQL and MongoDB, RDBA for MySQL and MongoDB and Percona Care.
We enjoyed working with Gartner last year and look forward to working with them on future MQs as criteria continues to evolve.
In the meantime, we will always strive to put the customer first. At every phase of Percona’s journey, we remain very grateful to the customers who trust us with their database environments. We will continue to earn and honor that trust.