MariaDB boss says IPO is part of his 3-year plan
Interview Michael Howard, Berkley grad and alumnus of Oracle and EMC, took the helm at open-source biz MariaDB almost three years ago. Reflecting on how things have changed, he reckons the biggest shift is in how both investors and enterprise have embrace open-source. Now, he has an IPO on his mind.
In an interview with El Reg, Howard – who, as noted at the time of his appointment, has worked for a number of companies who were slurped up by bigger businesses – said the end of 2018 will see the end of the first year of a three-year plan he devised for the firm.
Broadly, Howard sets out an overall roadmap of three pieces for the firm. Unsurprisingly, cloud native technology is first up. The other two are adaptive scalability, with the aim of supporting “mom and pop shops all the way to planet-scale processing for the largest social platforms”, and boosting the quality of service by professionalising people and technology, for instance through machine learning.
But in addition to these technical goals, there’s the business side of things, and the boss said the plan “is being able to go public; to be able to get the company buttoned up at the right revenue level to go public”.
“We have a voracious appetite for getting to our strategic goals, and part of that is revenue and going public.”
Howard emphasised he wasn’t putting the firm under pressure to make its initial public offering at any specific time – it will “not be doing things that are artificial”. It seems more likely that the move will be towards the end of the three-year plan than at some point in the next year.
But, he said, “as a company aspiring to go public, revenue – and cloud revenue – is extremely important”, and that, unsurprisingly, the firm will be aiming to “create more velocity in our revenue attainment”.
It’s an obvious next step that a number of open-source database vendors, such as Cloudera, ElasticSearch and MongoDB, have already taken. And it ties in to what Howard says is “the biggest holistic change” over the past three years: the embracing of open source.
In addition to IPOs, there have been a number of high-profile acquisitions in the area – GitHub, Mulesoft and most recently Red Hat. All of this has seen billions of dollars exchange hands, and extra value created in the stock market, Howard said.
