Database software provider Greenplum has taken $27 million Series C is a round led by Meritech Capital Partners that included Sun Microsystems and SAP Ventures.
Greenplum leverages open source database software and incorporates a “shared-nothing architecture that employs parallel processing on commodity hardware.”
Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz said that the investment, in conjunction with their recent acquisition of MySQL, provided further evidence of Sun’s commitment to the open source database community and marketplace.
The company has previously taken two rounds of $15 million each in March 2006 and February 2007. The new funding will be used to continue development of Greenplum’s database software, as well as to expand the company’s sales and marketing efforts.
Interesting.
So not only has Sun bought into the open-source lower end database MySQL but also is getting its feet wet into the more enterprisey Postgresql, of which Greenplum’s products are based on. Of course they offered support for Postgresql some time ago.
One could take from this that they are buying more Postgresql expertise and are going into open source databases in a big way to offer a full(er) stack to many of their customers and incidentally, compete with Oracle, or which Postgresql is more compatible with.
Postgresql has a BSD style license which is not amenable to acquisition like MySQL is.
We use Postgresql on a number of projects, including our site http://www.funadvice.com
Looks like Sun is very aggressively taking stakes in database companies.
Congratulations, Scott!