| MariaDB Cuts Workforce And Drops Products |
| Written by Kay Ewbank |
| Thursday, 19 October 2023 |
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MariaDB is reducing its workforce by 28% and dropping its SkySQL and Xpand products. The announcement was made in a notice from the US Securities and Exchange Commission; MariaDB is a publicly quoted company so needed to announce the changes to comply with the Securities Exchange Act.
The announcement says MariaDB has begun implementing its board-approved restructuring plan: "to better align its workforce with the needs of its business and to reduce the Company’s operating costs." The restructuring will see 84 people fewer people at the company. This follows earlier job cut announcements in April when MariaDB.com announced job cuts with 26 people out of a total workforce of 340 losing their jobs to cut costs. This news was followed by a warning that in a worst case scenario the company wouldn't have enough money to meet its ongoing financial needs. That pessimism looks to have been correct. Following the announcement in April, a Swedish venture capital company loaned MariaDB $26.5 million at an interest rate of 10%. MariaDB says this loan will be used to pay off an earlier loan. Meanwhile, a different venture capital company that owns some MariaDB stock has made an unsolicited bid for the remaining shares it doesn’t own. Alongside the financial announcements, the company also announced it would cease developing and selling SkySQL and Xpand, two of its more recent products. Instead, the company will focus on its core MariaDB Enterprise Server product which MariaDB has implemented for customers of SkySQL and Xpand to migrate away from those products. SkySQL was released in 2020 as a fully managed database-as-a-service, while MariaDB Xpand is a distributed SQL database that the company describe as scaling efficiently for modern massive-workload web applications that require strong consistency and data. The news of the job cuts and dropped products follows a recent announcement by Microsoft that it is dropping support for MariaDB on its Azure database services, replacing it with a free tier for the preview of Azure SQL database. MariaDB.com company founder Monty Widenius has been much less visible at MariaDB.com since Michael Howard took over as CEO, to the extent that there are rumors that he and the team of original developers have left the company. Widenius left the MariaDB.com board in 2022.
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| Last Updated ( Thursday, 19 October 2023 ) |
