Microsoft acquires Citus Data, re-affirming its commitment to Open Source and accelerating Azure PostgreSQL performance and scale

Data and analytics are increasingly at the center of digital transformation, with the most leading-edge enterprises leveraging data to drive customer acquisition and satisfaction, long-term strategic planning, and expansion into net new markets. This digital revolution is placing an incredible demand on technology solutions to be more open, flexible, and scalable to meet the demands of large data volumes, sub-second response times, and analytics driven business insights.

Microsoft is committed to building an open platform that is flexible and provides customers with technology choice to suit their unique needs. Microsoft Azure Data Services are a great example of a place where we have continuously invested in offering choice and flexibility with our fully managed community based open source relational database services, spanning MySQL, PostgreSQL and MariaDB. This builds on our other open source investments in SQL Server on Linux, a multi-model NoSQL database with Azure Cosmos DB, and support for open source analytics with the Spark and Hadoop ecosystems. With our acquisition of GitHub, we continue to expand on our commitment to empower developers to achieve more at every stage of the development lifecycle.

Building on these investments, I am thrilled to announce that we have acquired Citus Data, a leader in the PostgreSQL community. Citus is an innovative open source extension to PostgreSQL that transforms PostgreSQL into a distributed database, dramatically increasing performance and scale for application developers. Because Citus is an extension to open source PostgreSQL, it gives enterprises the performance advantages of a horizontally scalable database while staying current with all the latest innovations in PostgreSQL. Citus is available as a fully-managed database as a service, as enterprise software, and as a free open source download.

Since the launch of Microsoft’s fully managed community-based database service for PostgreSQL in March 2018, its adoption has surged. Earlier this month, PostgreSQL was named DBMS of the Year by DB-Engines, for the second year in a row. 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.

Together, Microsoft and Citus Data will further unlock the power of data, enabling customers to scale complex multi-tenant SaaS applications and accelerate the time to insight with real-time analytics over billions of rows, all with the familiar PostgreSQL tools developers know and love.

I am incredibly excited to welcome the high-caliber Citus Data team to Microsoft! Working together, we will accelerate the delivery of key, enterprise-ready features from Azure to PostgreSQL and enable critical PostgreSQL workloads to run on Azure with confidence. 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.

For more information on Citus Data, you can read the blog post from Umur Cubukcu, CEO and co-founder, here.

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