Distributed SQL Database Demand Drives Yugabyte’s Expansion in EMEA

Distributed SQL Database Demand Drives Yugabyte’s Expansion in EMEA
Appoints Martin Gaffney, Vice President EMEA to Grow Yugabyte’s Operation

Yugabyte, the leader in open source distributed SQL databases has announced an expanded global footprint with the opening of new business operations in the EMEA and APAC regions.

This coincides with the appointment of Martin Gaffney as Vice President, EMEA, Yugabyte, to lead the EMEA operation. Previously, Gaffney had been involved in building successful EMEA operations at high-growth technology companies. He founded the EMEA operation of ThoughtSpot Inc in 2015 and helped grow the company to a circa $2 billion (USD) valuation during his tenure.

Yugabyte has now officially established its presence in EMEA with a European HQ based in Surrey, the UK. The firm has imminent plans to expand into the DACH region and Benelux, with an initial focus in Germany and The Netherlands, to serve existing and new customers across the region. The company is also expanding its engineering team into Russia.

Karthik Ranganathan, CTO, Yugabyte said: “Our global expansion is being fuelled by the worldwide demand for the YugabyteDB open source distributed SQL database. We have focused our expansion in the regions with the highest customer demand and the best talent. We’re excited to continue our growth and build the team in EMEA under Martin’s leadership, to help us achieve our mission of becoming the default database for cloud native applications in a multi-cloud world.”

This follows a recent announcement by Yugabyte of a $48 million funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with additional participation by Greenspring Associates, Dell Technologies Capital, Wipro Ventures, and 8VC. This followed a $30 million (USD) capital raise announced in 2020, and the round brings Yugabyte’s total funding to $103 million. See the full March funding announcement for background.

Martin Gaffney, Vice President, EMEA, Yugabyte, commented: “I am delighted to join the leadership team to support the international growth of the company, and am confident that explosive growth for Yugabyte is a case of when, not if. The historical “system of record” database market is overdue for disruption. The growing move to cloud and microservices-based architectures is driving European enterprises to consider alternatives, as the monolithic, legacy providers’ technology is ill-suited to this new multi-cloud world. We are excited about scaling the EMEA operation and accelerating Yugabyte’s growth.”

Most recently Gaffney was Regional Sales Director, EMEA, H2O.ai, and earlier in his career, was an executive at the EMEA operations of Sequent Computer Systems, Tivoli Systems, and Netezza Corporation, the last three listed of which were acquired by IBM. Gaffney was also co-founder of Volantis Systems, now part of Pegasystems. David Walker also joins as EMEA Technical Director, Yugabyte, and with a 30 year career dedicated to helping organisations across industry sectors positively transform and use their data, he is charged with leading the technical customer engagement strategy across EMEA.

Yugabyte is the company behind YugabyteDB, the open source, high-performance distributed SQL database for building global, internet-scale applications. YugabyteDB serves business-critical applications with SQL query flexibility, high performance and cloud native agility, thus allowing enterprises to focus on business growth instead of complex data infrastructure management. Yugabyte was named a 2020 Cool Vendor by Gartner and is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, 8VC, Wipro Ventures, and Greenspring Associates.