QUOTE OF DAY:
“We will always have STEM with us. Some things will drop out of the public eye and will go away, but there will always be science, engineering, and technology. And there will always, always be mathematics.” ~ Katherine Johnson
WHAT’S MICROSOFT’S LATEST ACCOMPLISHMENT?
Microsoft is all in for takeovers for some time. A little while back, the IT giant bought GitHub for $7.5 billion. Now, their latest feather in cap is Citus Data.
Yesterday, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Citus Data. The open source database company was founded in 2010, and in past eight years has raised $13.2 million in venture capital funding. The company was started by a graduate from Y Combinator startup incubator program. The startup allured a handful of investors including Gmail creator Paul Buckheit, and SV Angel, Khosla Ventures. However, terms of the deal have not been revealed.
WHAT IS SO SPECIAL ABOUT CITUS DATA?
Citus Data, an open source PostgreSQL company, take PostgreSQL, a database management system, famous among developers, and mould it into databases that can be disbanded across various computers. This provides developers with the expertise to use their databases for most demanding apps.
WHAT IS THE MOTIVE BEHIND THE ACQUISITION?
Well, the acquisition was done to give Microsoft a competitive edge over AWS (Amazon Web Services) . The motive seems to win over developers and become a popular choice for top notch, and heavy-duty apps. Another possible motive could give competitive to Oracle which provides related database technology used by Citus Data.
Rohan Kumar, corporate vice president of Azure Data mentioned in a blog, “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.”
WHY THE SUDDEN CHANGE IN HEART?
Since forever, Microsoft has been against open source and also former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called open source, “cancer” However as CEO Satya Nadella has taken the control, Microsoft is working to change the image and now is ready to espouse open source with open arms.
Microsoft took GitHub under its wings October 2018 with the motive to flesh out on its investment in developers. After the acquisition, GitHub has started working on plans and announced that it will offer free private code repositories.
Microsoft Azure is already involved with various open source databases services such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MariaDB.
In March 2018, Microsoft Azure launched a database service for PostgreSQL. The latest acquisition of Citus Data, it can pursue scaling its database services to run PostgreSQL workloads as well as for customers on Azure with more efficiency and speed.
Rohan Kumar also mentioned, “We continue to be energized by building on our promise around Azure as the most comprehensive cloud to run open source and proprietary workloads at any scale and look forward to working with the PostgreSQL community to accelerate innovation to customers.”