Date: 2019-03-20
Time: 16:10–17:00
Room: Conference Room
Level: Intermediate
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I first came in touch with the PostgreSQL world in 2013. I undertook a project commissioned by 2ndQuadrant Italy, in collaboration with the Monash University in Melbourne. One of the objects of study was the company's marketing strategy. Therefore I had to research the Open Source Database Management market in Italy.
As part of that project I interviewed 72 companies and I quickly realised that open source software (OSS) was very often dismissed as a cheap alternative to proprietary software. Whilst the corporate world after the GFC changed and, in order to improve the bottom line, many companies started to have more interest over free to download products, the perception that proprietary products were higher quality and better supported was still there.
In this talk I would like to provide an overview on how the perception of Postgres has evolved over the last 5 years and why open source, and therefore PostgreSQL, is good for business. Popular misconceptions like the fact that open source databases are not secure, not supported or low quality are rapidly disappearing. Today, open source is acknowledged as the future of software by innovative organisations because it allows IT departments to accelerate the process of bringing their ideas to market. However there's still work to do to continue supporting the growth of the most advanced open source databases, starting from the organisation of dedicate conferences like PGCOnf Asia.