Microsoft recently announced that it has acquired open-source company Citus. The move comes at a time when the tech oligopoly is trying to expand its cloud offering and also commitment to open source. Last year, Microsoft acquired GitHub in a $7.5 billion deal. The news was first tweeted by Citus
Microsoft’s Rohan Kumar – Corporate Vice President, Azure Data described the move in a blog post
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.
Terms of the deal were not publicized and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment about whether Citus Cloud offering will continue on AWS.
Citus was founded in 2011 and had offices in San Francisco and Turkey, with 40 employees, according to LinkedIn data. Citus Data’s investors include Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, Data Collective and Khosla Ventures.