Greenplum's innovative technology and business model have generated significant customer and partner traction in a fast-growing market, and the company has the right team in place to execute on this tremendous opportunity. We're looking forward to supporting Greenplum as it accelerates its growth over the coming year.
San Mateo, California (PRWEB) January 22, 2008
Greenplum, a leading provider of database software for business intelligence, today announced that it has closed a $27 million round of financing led by Meritech Capital Partners, a leading provider of late-stage venture capital to premier information technology companies that has previously backed market leaders such as 2Wire, BigBand Networks, Facebook, Riverbed, Salesforce.com, TeleAtlas and NetSuite. This current round of funding also includes strategic investments from Sun Microsystems and SAP Ventures, a division of SAP AG. The new funds will be used to continue development of Greenplum's groundbreaking database, as well as to expand the company's sales and marketing efforts and grow its global market share in the $20 billion database market.
Today's news caps off a year of significant momentum for the company. Key milestones from 2007 include:
- Strong sales and revenue growth: In 2007, Greenplum grew its customer base by over 300% and saw a 10x increase in revenue.
- Key new hires: Earlier in the year, former Sun exec Bill Cook joined the company as Chief Executive Officer, and Michael Asher joined as Chief Financial Officer, helping to establish a strong foundation for growth in 2007 and beyond.
- Series B funding: In February of 2007, Greenplum announced $15 million Series B financing round led by Sierra Ventures.
- Global expansion: The company extended its sales and marketing efforts globally in 2007, resulting in sales and revenue growth in both Europe and Asia.
- Industry recognition: Greenplum was positioned in the "Visionaries" quadrant for Gartner Group's 2007 data warehouse database management magic quadrant report and was named to the Red Herring Global 100. Greenplum's customer Frontier Airlines won DM Review's "Innovative Solution" award and was named a finalist for Ventana Research's Performance Management Leadership award.
As the company accelerates its sales and marketing in 2008, Greenplum also announced two new additions to its management team: Paul Salazar has joined the company as Vice President of Corporate Marketing, and Joe Otto has joined as Vice President of Worldwide Sales. Salazar joins Greenplum from Coghead, a web services company, where he served as Vice President of Customer and Community Development. Salazar was also Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at SpikeSource and was Director of EMEA Marketing at Red Hat, the global leader in Linux and open source software. Prior to joining Greenplum, Otto was the Vice President of the Midwest Area for Sun Microsystems, a $1 billion sales unit focused on large enterprises across thirteen states. Otto was previously vice president of sales and marketing for Synergistics Inc., where he grew the company's revenues more than 300 percent over two years. He also served as operations director for Cisco Systems in its Telco Operations division and spent seven years earlier in his career at Sun Microsystems, where his department was responsible for over $700 million in revenue.
"Greenplum empowers customers to use data in new and inventive ways that wouldn't be possible with yesterday's technology. The opportunity to be a part of this game-changing company has attracted some of the country's top investors and talent," said Bill Cook, chief executive officer of Greenplum. "We're very pleased to add Meritech Capital, Sun and SAP Ventures to the elite group of investors who recognize the potential of this market and Greenplum's innovative solution. We're also thrilled to have added technology veterans Paul Salazar and Joe Otto to the team. Greenplum is well positioned for explosive growth as we further evolve the product and expand our global reach in 2008."
Greenplum's database technology was designed specifically to thrive in today's large-scale data environments and enable customers to quickly access and analyze massive volumes of data. Greenplum solutions leverage the power of commodity, general-purpose hardware, which dramatically reduces the cost and complexity of implementing an enterprise-class business intelligence system. The Greenplum team includes pioneers in open source, database systems, data warehousing, supercomputing and Internet performance acceleration.
"Greenplum is a strong fit for our portfolio. Meritech invests in companies with proven and differentiated technology, rapidly growing revenue and seasoned management teams," said Rob Ward, Managing Director of Meritech Capital Partners. "Greenplum's innovative technology and business model have generated significant customer and partner traction in a fast-growing market, and the company has the right team in place to execute on this tremendous opportunity. We're looking forward to supporting Greenplum as it accelerates its growth over the coming year."
"Alongside Sun's acquisition of MySQL, our investment in Greenplum is further evidence of our commitment to the open source database community and marketplace," said Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and president, Sun Microsystems. "Postgres has been a critical part of our support offering to customers, and Greenplum's leverage of Postgres to disrupt the proprietary vendors with breakthrough business intelligence solutions creates opportunity for their investors, and more importantly, our mutual customers."
"We invested in Greenplum because we're seeing a growing demand for scalable database technologies to support analytical and data-driven applications," said Nino Marakovic,
head of SAP Ventures. "From a technology perspective, the Greenplum database is very strong and complementary to our offerings. We share the vision of enterprises harnessing ever-growing data repositories to make optimal business decisions in real time."
About Greenplum:
Greenplum develops the world's fastest, most scalable database software for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing. Greenplum Database, the company's breakthrough database software product, enables companies to analyze terabytes of information faster and more cost effectively than traditional data warehouse solutions, allowing organizations to fully leverage their data to gain critical insights into the past, present and future and achieve and extend their competitive advantage in the marketplace. Greenplum Database also powers the Sun Data Warehouse Appliance, which integrates servers, storage and database to deliver industry leading performance, scalability, and cost of ownership. For more information about Greenplum, visit http://www.greenplum.com.
SAP and other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries all over the world. All other names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies.
Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "expect," "forecast," "intend," "may," "plan," "project," "predict," "should" and "will" and similar expressions as they relate to SAP are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. SAP undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations The factors that could affect SAP's future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), including SAP's most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.
###
