Greenplum Closes $19 Million Venture Capital Financing

Greenplum, maker of the world’s leading commercial open-source database for Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Warehousing, recently announced that it has closed a combined $19 million equity and debt financing and named former Sun Microsystems senior executive Bill Cook as Chief Executive Officer.

A 19-year veteran of Sun Microsystems, Inc., Bill was with the company before it went public in 1986, and starting out as an account executive, helped grow its automotive business from $1 million to more than $75 million. During his tenure at Sun, Bill held many leadership positions, most recently serving as Senior Vice President of US sales. In this position, he led a field force of 3,500 with revenues in excess of $5 billion.

“I am excited to be joining Greenplum as they have the same essential traits Sun Microsystems had in its early days -a large and growing market opportunity; truly disruptive technology; world-class talent; and a genuine passion to make a significant impact in the industry,” said Bill. “Additionally, our software-only focus, open-source community-centric approach, and ability to partner with leading systems vendors to deliver turnkey solutions represent a powerful new model for the BI and Data Warehousing industry. I look forward to helping Greenplum drive adoption of its breakthrough database within the enterprise, establishing our position as a market leader, and continuing to strengthen our partnerships with great companies like Sun.”

An entrepreneur at heart, Bill was Senior Vice President of Sales and Services at Penguin Computers immediately prior to Greenplum. At Penguin, he helped the company grow its business with established large enterprises. Prior to Sun, Bill held positions at Machine Vision International and Datapoint Corp. and graduated from Michigan State with a BA in business.

“Greenplum’s mission to reinvent the relational database for business intelligence rather than transaction processing has found strong resonance in the marketplace,” said Scott Yara, president of Greenplum. “With Bill as our CEO, and the support of such top-tier investors, we have all the right pieces in place to fulfill our vision of enabling companies to manage massive amounts of information, and make it all useful.”

A $15 million venture capital financing round was led by Sierra Ventures, an IT venture capital firm with more than $1.5 billion of committed capital that led investments in Intuit, Teradata, Healtheon, and Micromuse. Previous Greenplum investors Mission Ventures, Dawntreader Ventures, and EDF Ventures also participated in the round. In addition, Greenplum announced that Comerica Bank has extended a $4 million line of credit to the company. The new funds will be used to continue development of Greenplum’s breakthrough database, as well as to expand the company’s sales and marketing efforts globally.

In connection with the investment, Tim Guleri, a general partner at Sierra Ventures, who focuses on investments in enterprise software and open-source, will become a member of Greenplum’s board of directors. Guleri, is a successful entrepreneur having been the CEO and co-founder of Octane Software, and currently sits on the board of leading open-source company SourceFire.

“Sierra Ventures looks for companies that have developed disruptive technologies with the potential to transform big, existing markets. We recognized that the $30 billion dollar market for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing infrastructure had yet to benefit from the power of open-source software and general purpose computing” said Guleri. “By leveraging the global PostgreSQL database community and driving true innovation with its massively parallel processing technology, Greenplum’s breakthrough price-performance will fundamentally change the way companies use analytics to drive their business.”

Other noteworthy achievements in 2006 included the general availability of the Greenplum database; important customer wins such as Frontier Airlines and Smart Communications; and the establishment of a regional headquarters for Asia Pacific in Singapore. Greenplum has named data warehousing veteran Vinay Samuel as General Manager of the region.

In addition, in 2006, Greenplum received industry awards and accolades including LinuxWorld’s Best Clustering Product at the LinuxWorld Conference; recognition as “Top Open Source Company to Watch” by Red Herring Magazine; and a landmark partnership with Sun Microsystems.

In August 2006, Greenplum announced a partnership with Sun Microsystems to develop the first data warehouse appliance built from open-source software and general purpose hardware. As the first data warehouse appliance from a major systems vendor, the solution is capable of analyzing hundreds of terabytes of business data at a better price-performance than any product on the market.

Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Greenplum develops the world’s leading commercial open-source database for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing. Built on PostgreSQL, Greenplum’s breakthrough database products enables companies to analyze terabytes of information faster and more cost effectively than traditional data warehouse solutions. The company sponsors The Bizgres Project (www.bizgres.org), a community effort designed to make PostgreSQL the most robust open source database for data warehousing and BI.

For more information, please visit www.greenplum.com.