Microsoft acquires Citus Data with plans to create a ‘Best Postgres Experience’

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it has acquired Citus Data- a startup that specializes in big data and analytics.Citus is an extension to the open source database management system PostgreSQL, which transforms PostgreSQL into a distributed database.

The start-up was founded in 2011 and apart from their Citus extension, 'Citus Cloud' database as a service powers billions of transactions every day giving rise to the world’s first horizontally scalable relational database which can be run on premises, and as a fully-managed service on the cloud.

Citus has varied applications ranging from SaaS companies who run their core applications on Citus Cloud scaling their business on-demand to businesses using Citus to power their real-time analytics dashboards. Citus also states that they have been able to help many Fortune 100 companies migrate to an open, horizontally scalable Postgres ecosystem and have improved developer performance while providing them with scalability to power their workloads without re-architecting their applications.

In a blog post, Umur Cubukcu, Ozgun Erdogan, and Sumedh Pathak; co-founders of Citus Data said that as part of Microsoft, “we will stay focused on building an amazing database on top of PostgreSQL that gives our users the game-changing scale, performance, and resilience they need.”

Adding to this point, Microsoft admits that “Both Citus and Microsoft share a mission of openness, empowering developers, and choice. And we both love PostgreSQL. We are excited about joining forces, and the value that doing so will create: Delivering to our community and our customers the world’s best PostgreSQL experience.”

Acquiring Citus is a step towards Microsoft’s commitment to Open Source technologies as well as enhancing Azure PostgreSQL performance and scalability as customer workloads keep expanding. Earlier this month, DB-Engines conferred the title of DBMS of the Year on PostgreSQL. Microsoft and Citus Data have committed themselves to enable customers in scaling complex multi-tenant SaaS applications and accelerate the time to insight with real-time analytics over huge amounts of data, all with the familiar PostgreSQL tools.

Developers have received this news well. Twitter saw many users commenting on the decision being a smart once, since PostgreSQL is well used among developers.

https://twitter.com/izotov/status/1088563182006923264

https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1088578781663571975

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. To know more about this announcement, head over to Microsoft's official blog.