2ndQuadrant

2ndQuadrant
Name	2ndQuadrant
Type	Private
Industry	Software
Founded	2001
Fate	Acquired by EDB in 2019
Headquarters	London, United Kingdom; Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Products	PostgreSQL support, replication, tools

2ndQuadrant was a multinational company specializing in support, services, and software for the PostgreSQL relational database management system. Founded in 2001 with offices in London and Minneapolis, Minnesota, the company provided commercial support for enterprise deployments, developed replication and management tools, and contributed to the PostgreSQL Global Development Group community. 2ndQuadrant operated in markets alongside vendors such as EnterpriseDB, Red Hat, IBM, Microsoft and engaged with projects and organizations including OpenStack, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Fedora Project.

History

2ndQuadrant was established in 2001 amid growth in open source projects like Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. Early activity intersected with developments at Sun Microsystems, Oracle Corporation, IBM and standards efforts such as SQL. The company expanded through engagements with institutions like NASA, European Space Agency, U.S. Department of Defense, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and technology firms including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Uber Technologies that adopted PostgreSQL at scale. Over time 2ndQuadrant grew roles similar to firms like Percona, Crunchy Data, and SUSE in the open source database space. In 2019 2ndQuadrant was acquired by EnterpriseDB (EDB), consolidating resources with other PostgreSQL-focused teams.

Services and Products

2ndQuadrant offered commercial support, consulting, training, and managed services for PostgreSQL similar to offerings from Red Hat Enterprise Linux service teams. Its product suite included tools for high availability and replication such as Bucardo-style asynchronous replication and what competed with Oracle Data Guard, Microsoft SQL Server Always On, and IBM Db2 High Availability Manager. The company developed a suite of extensions and utilities analogous to pgAdmin, psql, pgPool-II, and Patroni to assist customers like Deutsche Bank, Barclays, HSBC, BBC, Spotify, and Netflix with migration, tuning, backup, and disaster recovery. 2ndQuadrant also provided cloud-focused services interacting with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and orchestration tools from Kubernetes, Docker, and OpenShift.

Open Source Contributions

2ndQuadrant maintained active participation in the PostgreSQL Global Development Group and contributed patches, extensions, and bug fixes comparable to contributions by Heikki Linnakangas, Tom Lane, Peter Eisentraut, Magnus Hagander, and Haribabu Kommi. The firm worked on replication code, performance improvements, and tools interoperable with projects like pgBackRest, pgBouncer, repmgr, and wal-e. 2ndQuadrant engineers engaged with standards and communities including IETF, W3C, OpenStack Foundation, and package ecosystems for Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Contributions also aligned with enterprise projects such as Ansible, Terraform, Prometheus, and Grafana for observability and automation.

Corporate Structure and Leadership

2ndQuadrant's leadership included executives and engineers who previously worked at organizations like Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Oracle Corporation, and Nokia. The company maintained distributed teams across continents, collaborating with regional partners such as SUSE, Canonical, Rackspace, Accenture, and Capgemini. Its corporate governance adhered to practices common among private technology firms and interfaced with investors and acquirers including EDB and advisory services from firms like Deloitte, KPMG, PwC, and Ernst & Young.

Partnerships and Clients

2ndQuadrant partnered with cloud providers, systems integrators, and software vendors such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Red Hat, SUSE, Canonical, VMware, and Cisco Systems. Major clients and reference customers included financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Credit Suisse, media organizations such as BBC, technology companies like Twitter, Netflix, Spotify, and public sector bodies including NHS (England), UK Ministry of Defence, and municipal governments. The company also engaged in collaborative projects with research organizations including CERN, Max Planck Society, MIT, and Stanford University.

Awards and Recognition

2ndQuadrant received industry recognition for services and engineering contributions, appearing in lists alongside companies honored by organizations like The Linux Foundation, Open Source Initiative, Gartner, and Forrester Research. The company was cited in case studies that featured platforms such as Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, Microsoft Azure SQL Database alternatives, and interoperable solutions with Kubernetes and OpenShift. 2ndQuadrant's engineers were invited speakers at conferences including PostgresOpen, FOSDEM, PGCon, OSCON, ApacheCon, and LinuxCon.

Category:PostgreSQL Category:Free software companies Category:Software companies of the United Kingdom