MariaDB Ushers in New Era with Paul O’Brien as CEO, Unveils Ambitious Growth Plan

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. and DUBLIN, May 31, 2023 — MariaDB today announced Paul O’Brien has been appointed as the company’s new CEO and will serve as a member of the board of directors, effective May 26, 2023. Michael Howard, the company’s current CEO, will remain on the board of directors to provide strategic planning and oversight. The board has also appointed Tom Siegel as chief revenue officer (CRO) to lead the sales, consulting, support and training teams, and Jonah Harris as chief technology officer (CTO), effective June 5, 2023.

“Paul and Tom both have a track record of building successful SaaS companies as well as a broad understanding of how to drive growth and profitability at companies such as MariaDB,” said Alex Suh, chairman of the board, MariaDB plc. “Over the course of seven and a half years, Michael has expertly architected the transformation of MariaDB from an open-source offering to a cloud business that successfully competes with the hyperscalers. It’s thanks to his leadership and accomplishments that we enter the next growth phase, which is already reflected in our robust Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) growth. With the additions of Paul and Tom to our already strong management team, we are confident we can move further and faster toward our ambitious goals.”

“MariaDB is headed in the right direction – look at the amazing talent we’ve attracted, the differentiation of our products – momentum is building and it’s the start of something spectacular,” said Howard. “For the next phase of growth, bringing in a fresh set of eyes is what’s needed to get to the next step. After many years of everyone’s hard work – from engineering to sales and marketing, and everyone in between, it’s all coming together. My heartfelt thanks to everyone.”

O’Brien has served as SVP, sales and field operations of the company since March 2023. Prior to joining MariaDB, he served as VP, Operations at NetApp, Inc., a storage and data management company and VP, Business Intelligence and Operations at Symantec Corporation, a security company. Prior to that, O’Brien held various management positions at EMC Corporation, a storage and data management company, and HP Inc. (then Hewlett-Packard Company), a technology company, and also served as a partner at Prism Venture Partners, a venture firm. In all these roles, O’Brien was responsible for successfully guiding companies in their evolution from on-prem deployments and perpetual license software to subscription and cloud-based models.

“Having guided MariaDB sales, I’ve personally witnessed the immense value we deliver to customers through our products and people,” said O’Brien. “There is a huge opportunity at MariaDB’s fingertips and I am confident in our ability to capitalize on this potential and achieve unprecedented growth. Michael led us through significant milestones – we are now a publicly traded company with a strong cloud product. This facilitates a smooth transition to a focused go-to-market strategy to accelerate the business toward a targeted $100 million ARR by the end of 2025.”

Siegel has an impressive background as a sales and operations executive, coupled with extensive experience building and leading high-performance teams for both private and public SaaS companies. He was most recently CRO at Bringg, a SaaS delivery management platform. Prior to that, he was chief sales officer at Fuze, a cloud communications software company and VP of worldwide sales operations at PTC, a global software company. He has also held sales leadership positions at EMC and BMC Software. Siegel has successfully driven accelerated growth for SaaS companies through a combination of go-to-market strategy, sales leadership and adherence to key performance metrics, with demonstrated ARR growth from $50 million to $100 million.

“MariaDB has gone through an incredible transformation to become a prominent cloud company with MariaDB SkySQL, a second generation cloud database,” said Siegel. “This presents a remarkable opportunity for the company to take a larger share of the relational database market, expected to be $72 billion by 2026. I look forward to working with the stellar team at MariaDB to continue driving value to customers, whether its cloud services such as backup and observability to community on-prem users or multicloud benefits with exceptional scale and resilience.”

About MariaDB

MariaDB (NYSE:MRDB) is a new generation cloud database company whose products are used by companies big and small, reaching more than a billion users through Linux distributions and have been downloaded over one billion times. Deployed in minutes and maintained with ease, leveraging cloud automation, our database products are engineered to support any workload, any cloud and any scale – all while saving up to 90% of proprietary database costs. Trusted by organizations such as Bandwidth, DigiCert, InfoArmor, Oppenheimer, Samsung, SelectQuote and SpendHQ, MariaDB’s software is the backbone of critical services that people rely on every day.

Source: MariaDB