Today, I’m very excited to announce the next chapter in our company’s journey: Microsoft has acquired Citus Data.

When we founded Citus Data eight years ago, the world was different. Clouds and big data were newfangled. The common perception was that relational databases were, by design, scale up only—limiting their ability to handle cloud scale applications and big data workloads. This brought the rise of Hadoop and all the other NoSQL databases people were creating at the time. At Citus Data, we had a different idea: that we would embrace the relational database, while also extending it to make it horizontally scalable, resilient, and worry-free. That instead of re-implementing the database from scratch, we would build upon PostgreSQL and its open and extensible ecosystem.

Fast forward to 2019 and today’s news: we are thrilled to join a team who deeply understands databases and is keenly focused on meeting customers where they are. 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.

As I reflect on our Citus Data journey, I am very proud of what our team has accomplished. We created Citus to transform PostgreSQL into a distributed database—giving developers game-changing performance improvements and delivering queries that are magnitudes faster than proprietary implementations of Postgres. We packaged Citus as an open source extension of PostgreSQL—so you could always stay current with the latest version of Postgres, unlike all forks of databases prior to it. We launched our Citus Cloud database as a service and grew it to power billions of transactions every day—creating the world’s first horizontally scalable relational database that you can run both on premises, and as a fully-managed service on the cloud.

The most fulfilling part of this journey has been seeing all the things our customers can now do because of Citus—from SaaS companies who run their core applications on Citus Cloud to scale their business on-demand; to large enterprises who use Citus to power their real-time analytics dashboards; to organizations who serve both transactional and analytical workloads with one database (Citus); to Fortune 100 companies who are now able to migrate to an open, horizontally scalable Postgres ecosystem; to developers who now have a more scalable and performant way to power their workloads—all without re-architecting their applications.

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. We will continue to drive innovation in this space. We remain as committed to our customers as ever, and will continue providing the strong support for the products our customers use today. And we will continue to actively participate in the Postgres community, working on the Citus open source extension as well as the other open source Postgres extensions you love.

All of this would not have been possible without the support of the PostgreSQL community, our customers, and the amazing team we are privileged to work with. We are humbled to work with all of you, and we are looking forward to working together as we deliver ever bigger things to our community, our users, and our customers in the next chapter of our journey—now as part of Microsoft.

To read more about our exciting news, please visit the Official Microsoft Blog.

—Umur Cubukcu, Ozgun Erdogan, and Sumedh Pathak, co-founders of Citus Data

Update: To learn more about what’s happening with Citus on Azure, you can:

Citus Data team meeting in Carmel, CA.