Michael' Monty' Widenus created MySQL, the open source relational database management system, in May 1995. So important was it to him that he named it after his eldest daughter - My. The company that he founded to promote his technology - MySQL AB - grew rapidly and was purchased by Sun Microsystems in February 2008 for $1bn.

Monty considered Sun Microsystems an ideal new home for his creation but was less happy when Oracle acquired the company two years later. In response, Monty and members of the original MySQL development team formed 'The Monty Program' to fork the codebase and create 'MariaDB' -(named after Monty's youngest daughter, Maria).

The Monty Program worked closely with a commercial entity set up by MySQL's original backers called SkySQL AB until the two companies merged in 2012.

Like many open source start-ups, SkySQL was driven by a highly passionate team of engineers and experienced sales hunters. However, the company hadn't inherited much of the inside sales and marketing prowess evident in its better-known forerunner.

It was into this environment that I was appointed Director of Marketing. I found a group of highly capable people with excellent technology who needed help stitching together their online presence, HubSpot marketing automation platform, lead lifecycle, and Salesforce CRM.

The mechanics of fixing their end-to-end inbound lead generation, conversion, and measurement platform were reasonably straight-forward. What was more challenging was building a differentiating story around MariaDB that was true to its open source heritage but could also be used to massively increase developer adoption in the brave new world of cloud-native applications and services.

As part of this transformation, I lead the brand migration of SkySQL AB to MariaDB Corporation. The challenge was to ensure the company's primacy in providing products and services into the MariaDB eco-system without being seen as exploitative of its free technology.

Since becoming MariaDB Corporation, the company has grown from strength to strength by building critical new partnerships with ServiceNow and Alibaba, acquiring Clustrix, and expanding its customer base to include RedHat, 1&1, and DBS Bank.