EnterpriseDB has named former executive Ed Boyajian as president and chief executive officer.
Effective June 9, Boyajian will replace Andy Astor, who will stay with the company as executive vice president of business development. Boyajian, 45, spent the last six years at Red Hat, most recently serving as vice president and general manager of North American sales. Boyajian’s arrival comes roughly two months after the database provider launched its new Postgres Plus product line.
“The recent announcement of the Postgres Plus strategy is a really important one for the company, and I think a priority for me is to make sure that we continue to execute on that plan from an enterprise standpoint by making it easy for developers … to work with the product,” he said. “The open-source underpinnings of this company are fundamental to its success, so we’ll continue to stay actively engaged with the Postgres community.”
The company is banking on Boyajian’s background in sales and open source to propel EnterpriseDB forward after the successful completion of a round of funding that brought in $10 million from a group that included venture capitalist firms and IBM.
Comparing EnterpriseDB’s current position with that of Red Hat six years ago, he said the time is right for open-source databases to see a new level of adoption among organizations.
MySQL remains the most popular of the open-source databases in terms of adoption, followed by PostgreSQL. Since its founding, EnterpriseDB has positioned itself as a global provider of support and services for PostgreSQL, building Oracle compatibility features on top of the open-source database.
“I think our focus will continue to be on helping those developers take advantage of the inherent merits of Postgres and I think the advantages we provide with the Postgres Plus product family,” Boyajian said.
At Red Hat, he led sales and field marketing efforts across all the company’s commercial segments and channels in North America. Prior to serving as vice president and general manager of North American sales at Red Hat, he was the company’s vice president of worldwide OEM and North American channels, establishing partnerships with IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell. He was also vice president of North American sales east during the launch of the company’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux products.