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Print Edition StoriesFriday, May 7, 2010
Ex-Sun exec Padir turns focus to startup's open-source software
By Rodney H. Brown
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Karen Tegan Padir
Position: Vice president of products and marketing, EnterpriseDB Corp.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in computer science and MBA, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Age: 41
Quote: “I’m not moving to the West Coast. Should it matter with today’s technology? Not really. It doesn’t really matter kind of where we live.”
Karen Tegan Padir is an evangelist. Her gospel is open source software, and she recently changed denominations when she left Sun Microsystems Inc., where she was in charge of running the departments that determined the future of such ubiquitous Internet software as Java and MySQL.
Now Padir is proselytizing about another of the many SQL database schisms, PostgreSQL, at the Westford startup EnterpriseDB Corp. And Padir said that her new gospel is better beloved of the Java congregation than her previous MySQL mission.
“PostgreSQL very specifically has always been the choice of the Java developers,” she said. “It is kind of a different beast than MySQL.”
Both beasts are relational databases that are used as the backbone of almost any website that has a lot of information that needs to be organized so it can be called on and displayed on demand.
Because it is a free, open source product, MySQL became one of the parts of the famous LAMP stack of free software that runs a website — Linux operating system, Apache Web server, MySQL and PHP, the server-side scripting software that builds Web pages on the fly. The key there is that they are all free, and that fact in no small part drove the explosive growth of the Internet.
“A day doesn’t go by when you don’t interact with MySQL,” Padir said, noting it is the database behind Myspace and Facebook, just to name two very popular websites.
You might not think that the open source mission would be something held dear by a student of the tony Phillips Exeter Academy. Padir went there as a high school student, with the likes of “Andre Moulson, Doug Coors and John Paul Getty, but he got thrown out.”
Padir went on to get a bachelor’s degree and an MBA from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and went to work immediately at minicomputer company Stratus Computer Inc. of Marlborough as a software engineer. Four years later, in 1993, Padir took a job as a technical support engineer at Sun Microsystems, and she remained there until March of this year — except for a single stint at Red Hat Inc. in its Westford office that lasted one year. But it was at Stratus that she first got exposed to the concept of “open” software, first with open standards in the form of UNIX.
“When I graduated from school and went to work for Stratus, they have a proprietary operating system, VOS, and I worked on that,” she said. “Then they said, ‘Hey, we need to start worrying about UNIX.’”
At Sun, she got exposed to Java, and its enterprise development platform, J2EE, and has been a devotee of open standards and open source software ever since. That has led to some challenges, even within Sun, because not everything Sun was marketing was open source.
“With J2EE we had this great product, but we had to firewall off our development team from the rest of Sun because those people said ‘We don’t want to work with people who are competing with us,’” Padir said.
The 41-year-old Melrose native also spent much of her time at Sun turning down requests to get her to relocate to the West Coast, where Sun has its headquarters.
“I’m not moving to the West Coast,” Padir said. “Should it matter with today’s technology? Not really. It doesn’t really matter kind of where we live.”
That makes the open source development model even more applicable today, Padir said. In open source software development, an entire community of users of the software contributes to its advancement, adding elements and features, and finding and fixing problems. Those changes get posted through the Internet on user community forums and boards, so that all other users can adopt the changes, or not, as they see fit. That obviously makes monetizing open source a big challenge, Padir admits. That led her to jump from Sun to Red Hat.
“Red Hat had recruited me really hard and I wanted to do open source, and I thought, ‘What better place to learn about open source?’ — not just the development but also the business model,” she said. “Sun came back in a little less than a year and said, ‘We’re ready. We are going to go open source with Java and we want you to lead it.’ ”
Her time at Red Hat showed Padir that you can make money with open source software, in two ways. First, by packaging it with a bunch of support components into a single install package that you sell, so that users don’t have to hunt down each individual piece and download them from the Internet. Second, and perhaps more important, is having the best experts to provide paid support and advice for users of the open source product. As the owner of the license for the free software Java, Sun could rightly claim to be the best.
Now at EnterpriseDB, Padir can bring her years of focusing on how to apply open source to the enterprise to the one SQL database that has traditionally been thought of as more enterprise-ready than MySQL. PostgreSQL has been described by experts as the Oracle of SQL databases.
“Everybody has heard of MySQL,” Padir said, but “anybody who is flying is interacting with PostgreSQL — the FAA uses a PostgreSQL database. And Skype — there’s lots of big volume users of PostgreSQL on the Internet.”
When not proselytizing on the business value of adopting open source software, Padir spends time in Arlington — or on the island of Nantucket — with her husband and her two daughters, ages 10 and 12.
If there is time after all of that, she likes to get outdoors and enjoys running, biking, skiing and her latest activity, learning how to play golf.
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