Working together, Microsoft and Citus Data aims to accelerate the delivery of key, enterprise-ready features from Azure to PostgreSQL
Re-affirming its commitment to open source, American tech giant Microsoft on Thursday announced that it has acquired Citus Data, a startup that has commercialized open-source database software called PostgreSQL. However, it didn’t disclose the terms of the deal.
According to LinkedIn data, Citus Data was founded in 2011 and has offices in San Francisco and Turkey, with 40 employees. Its investors include Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, Data Collective and Khosla Ventures.
Citus is available as a fully-managed database as a service, as enterprise software, and as a free open source download.
“I am incredibly excited to welcome the high-caliber Citus Data team to Microsoft! Working together, we will accelerate the delivery of key, enterprise-ready features from Azure to PostgreSQL and enable critical PostgreSQL workloads to run on Azure with confidence,” Rohan Kumar, Corporate Vice President for Azure data at Microsoft, wrote in the blog post.
Open source extension to PostgreSQL
Citus is an innovative open source extension to PostgreSQL that transforms PostgreSQL into a distributed database, dramatically increasing performance and scale for application developers.
Microsoft claims that since the launch of its fully managed community-based database service for PostgreSQL in March 2018, the software’s adoption has surged.
“The acquisition of Citus Data builds on Azure’s open source commitment and enables us to provide the massive scalability and performance our customers demand as their workloads grow,” Kumar said.
“Together, Microsoft and Citus Data will further unlock the power of data, enabling customers to scale complex multi-tenant SaaS applications and accelerate the time to insight with real-time analytics over billions of rows, all with the familiar PostgreSQL tools developers know and love,” he added.
Umur Cubukcu, CEO and co-founder, Citus Data, in a blog post noted that both Citus and Microsoft share a mission of openness, empowering developers, and choice and both love PostgreSQL.
As part of Microsoft, he says, they will stay focused on building an amazing database on top of PostgreSQL that gives users the game-changing scale, performance, and resilience they need.
