A year and a half ago, Pervasive Software proudly proclaimed its enterprise support effort for the open source PostgreSQL database.
The honeymoon is long over and so is Pervasive’s support for PostgreSQL.
In an open letter to the PostgreSQL community, Pervasive President John Farr eulogized his company’s exit from the PostgreSQL enterprise support market.
“While we always knew that PostgreSQL is a solid product with advanced database capabilities and that it has a very real opportunity to shake up the high-end database market, we underestimated the high level of quality support and expertise already available within the PostgreSQL community,” Farr wrote.
In recent months, the quality support and expertise that Farr described has increased thanks to the efforts of Enterprise DB, which entered the PostgreSQL market in May 2005.
Sun Microsystems also supports PostgreSQL because it sees significant potential in the open source database.
Chris Ratcliffe, director of marketing for System Software at Sun, told internetnews.com in June that Sun has some customers who believe that they can replace 30 percent of their existing commercial databases with an open source alternative.
So where does that leave a smaller firm like Pervasive Software?
“In this environment, we found that the opportunity for Pervasive Software to meaningfully increase adoption of PostgreSQL by providing an alternative source for support and services was quite limited,” Farr wrote in the open letter.
“Accordingly, we have made the decision today to substantially curtail our focus on our PostgreSQL initiative.”
“While we are bringing to an end our present PostgreSQL-related initiatives, we remain a champion of the cause — high-performance, low-cost software solutions,” Farr continued.
