Percona Declares 'The Way is Open' in Bold Rebrand as the Industry's Loudest Challenger
The open source database company marks 20 years with a new brand and a direct challenge to an industry selling open source while locking the door behind it
RALEIGH, N.C., April 16, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Modern data infrastructure has a dirty secret. The platforms sold as open, flexible, and developer-friendly are none of those things once you're inside them. Costs climb. Control shrinks. And leaving becomes harder by design.
Percona is done pretending otherwise.
Today, Percona, the open source database software, support, and services company, announces a bold new brand identity built around a single, non-negotiable idea: The Way Is Open. Not as a slogan. As a market stance. A direct challenge to the lock-in, cost inflation, and false promises of openness that have come to define modern data infrastructure.
"Lock-in isn't a side effect of the current model: it is the business model," said Peter Farkas, Chief Executive Officer at Percona. "Open source was supposed to change that. For a lot of vendors, it became a marketing term instead. Percona was built on the belief that organizations should have real freedom over their data infrastructure, the freedom to run it how they want, on the infrastructure they choose, and to leave if they want to. We've held that belief now for 20 years and counting."
The Problem with "Open"
The word open has been doing a lot of work in this industry. Too much.
Vendors describe their platforms as open. They publish source code under licenses that restrict commercial use, lock you into proprietary tooling, and make migration painful enough that it never happens. Engineers who wanted flexibility end up managing black boxes. Organizations that thought they were building on open source find out, at renewal time, what open actually costs them.
Percona's position is simple: if the architecture doesn't give you control, if the pricing doesn't give you predictability, and if the contract doesn't give you the right to leave, it isn't open. It's a subscription with extra steps.
Why Now
Percona turns 20 this year. The company has grown, brought in new leadership, and expanded its depth across MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB and Valkey/Redis with plans to expand further into additional technologies. The new identity is the visual and verbal expression of a company that has spent two decades in the trenches of open source database operations and has earned the right to say what most vendors won't.
"If 'The Way Is Open' were just a brand campaign, it wouldn't survive its first quarter," said Gareth Case, Senior VP of Marketing. "It survives because it's how we win. Customers want a partner that earns their business every year, not one that traps them into staying. 'The Way Is Open' means every customer has the freedom to choose. That's not a brand position. That's a business model. And it's the only one that deserves to win."
As part of the same chapter, Percona is expanding its leadership bench across key open source ecosystems, deepening its involvement with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and The Linux Foundation, and bringing back its annual Percona Live conference, with events in both the USA in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Europe in Amsterdam.
What Developers Already Know
The engineers running production databases already understand the problem. They've watched "managed" come to mean giving up visibility and control. They've filed tickets into vendor support queues and waited. They've seen licensing terms change after a platform became critical for production. They've tried to leave and discovered the exit was bricked up and almost impossible to break through.
Percona exists for those people. The company develops and maintains freely available open source software for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB, and actively contributes to open source projects across the data ecosystem, including Valkey. It also runs a 24/7 expert support operation and provides the kind of hands-on database expertise that keeps organizations in control of their own infrastructure.
The industry is ready for something different. Percona has been that alternative for two decades and counting.
About Percona:
Percona is an open source database software, support, and services company with a simple belief: organizations should have full control over their data infrastructure, without lock-in, without compromise, and without paying a vendor for the privilege of leaving. For 20 years, Percona has helped businesses run databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Valkey and Redis securely, performantly, and on their own terms — through freely available open source software, 24/7 expert support, and hands-on database expertise. The way is open. For more information, visit www.percona.com.
Janabeth Ward
Senior Account Director, PR – Scratch Marketing + Media (for Percona)
Percona@scratchmm.com
A video accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/b8f77a75-fd55-4693-baf2-cba32850e434
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