K1 Investment Management, the brand new proprietor of MariaDB, despatched a powerful trace about what its future plans for the corporate might entail with the appointment of Rohit de Souza because the group’s new CEO. While he now has the problem of overseeing product growth, of observe is what his specialty was up to now.
According to his LinkedIn profile, de Souza’s final three jobs have all concerned getting ready enterprise models or entire corporations for acquisition or resale. The three organizations had been Micro Focus International, a supplier of software program and providers which OpenText bought in January 2023 for $5.eight billion, Actian, a software program firm bought by HCL Technologies and Sumeru Equity Partners for $338 million in 2018, and BeyondCore, an organization that specialised in enterprise intelligence and analytics that Salesforce bought in 2016, the place phrases of the deal weren’t disclosed.
His appointment on Monday coincided with a launch from K1 saying that it had accomplished its tender supply to amass 100% of the issued strange shares of MariaDB, a corporation that gives database providers and SaaS choices constructed on the core open-source database that’s managed by the MariaDB Foundation.
The preliminary non-binding proposal for acquisition of the agency, headquartered in Silicon Valley and Dublin, Ireland, which was first introduced in February, sparked hypothesis in regards to the firm’s future and what the acquisition would imply for its enterprise clients.
In May, an announcement that its shareholders had accepted the K1 supply got here after the corporate was hit with extra unhealthy information: ServiceNow was shifting away from MariaDB and “migrating all customers to a new database called RaptorDB,” which is a fork of PostgreSQL.
Commenting on the supply on the time, Carl Olofson, analysis vice chairman and database analyst with IDC, mentioned the important thing to figuring out what occurs subsequent is why the acquisition occurred within the first place. “When you see something like this, there is one of two motivations. One is that you want to dismantle the company, and make a profit from the assets, which is not going to be the case here, because they do not really have assets.”
The different choice, he mentioned, is “to really believe that with proper management and the right approach, the company can grow far beyond where it’s at now – make fabulous profits, sell it off and everybody walks away happy.”
Doug Henschen, vice chairman and principal analyst…
