M.R. Asks 3 Questions: Michael Howard, CEO, MariaDB
Summary
I spoke with Howard about the open source mandate proliferating in major enterprises, the strategy for battling tech titans, and the power of a global development organization.Wall Street knows proprietary software makers charge millions of dollars for their products and that cost can impact the enterprise’s bottom line.It’s like buying a Hummer: They sell you a really robust set of functions to go all-terrain at a really high price, but it’s not what people really need and driving such a gas guzzler is too embarrassing for most customers these days.We use Zoom, Slack, “town halls,” all-hands meetings, and even a roving Beam robot that allows us to see faces and hear bits of conversations so we feel closer together.The ad hoc nature of coworker interaction is difficult to mimic in a distributed world but we have deployed the best solutions and experienced great success.