Former Pivotal Software President Bill Cook Joins Yugabyte as CEO to Lead Next Stage of Growth

Cook brings shared values and proven track record to Yugabyte's executive team

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Yugabyte, the leader in open source distributed SQL databases, today announced the appointment of Bill Cook as Chief Executive Officer. Kannan Muthukkaruppan, co-founder of Yugabyte and founding CEO, takes the role of President, Product Development and will continue to oversee development for the company’s cloud native, open source, distributed SQL database, YugabyteDB, and its commercial products.

Cook brings more than 35 years of experience in enterprise software and data infrastructure, steering companies under his leadership through massive growth, from early-stage to IPO and beyond. Prior to Yugabyte, Cook served as President and co-founder of Pivotal Software, where he was part of the leadership team that helped solidify the company as the gold standard in cloud native software development and led Pivotal through its IPO and subsequent merger with VMware in 2019. Prior to Pivotal, Cook was CEO of Greenplum, where he helped grow the data analytics platform company from its startup roots through to a major acquisition by EMC in 2010.

In his role as CEO of Yugabyte, Cook will drive continued market adoption and expansion of Yugabyte Platform and Yugabyte Cloud across enterprises, along with increasing YugabyteDB’s open source community momentum.

"Beyond the rich experience and complementary strengths Bill brings to Yugabyte as a leader, I am impressed with who Bill is as a person. His core values and strong work ethic align with the values Karthik, Mikhail and I hold dearly about building a great company with a culture that values its people, community and customers," said Muthukkaruppan. "Having Bill on the team will give me more time to focus on Yugabyte’s product development and strategy, and to work closely with our community members in their database transformation journeys."

Enterprises in financial services, ecommerce and telecommunications are running YugabyteDB to manage globally-distributed business-critical services at a massive scale. This enterprise adoption is being driven by Yugabyte’s open source community, which has seen a 4x increase in new clusters, a 13x increase in Slack users and a 3x increase in GitHub stars in the last year.

“YugabyteDB is the only open source, enterprise-grade relational database that alleviates the pain organizations face as they embrace a cloud native architecture in a multi-cloud world. Yugabyte is better positioned than any other company in this fast-growing market to become the de-facto cloud native database provider and replace traditional RDBMS players like Oracle,” said Cook. “Yugabyte's co-founders have created an incredible foundation with a strong company culture and attracted some of the best talent in the industry. I’m honored to be part of this team.”

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About Yugabyte

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. It is trusted by companies in cybersecurity, financial markets, IoT, retail and e-commerce verticals. Founded in 2016 by former Facebook and Oracle engineers, Yugabyte is backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Dell Technologies Capital. www.yugabyte.com.