O'Reilly Media and Greenplum Launch Beta of O'Reilly Connection at OSCON; New Jobs and Networking Site ``Unites the Global Geekforce''

Business Wire, August 3, 2005

PORTLAND, Ore. -- O'Reilly Media launched the beta version of O'Reilly Connection (http://connection.oreilly.com) at their Open Source Convention (OSCON) today. With the aim of "uniting the global geekforce," O'Reilly Connection is a tech-centric jobs and networking site for developers and those who want to hire them. The service was conceived and created by Greenplum, a company commercializing the open-source database PostgreSQL for Business Intelligence (BI).

"When ramping up our development team, I realized that we couldn't easily find good candidates with open source development skills," said Sam Mohamad, CEO of Greenplum. "We'd go through our contact lists, and post to general job sites, but it was a laborious and not always successful process. I decided we could build a professional community that does a better job of bringing developers and employers together, especially for open source and emerging technologies."

Greenplum built an initial version of the service, and then, to make it widely available to the community, decided to contribute it to O'Reilly. "We're really committed to what Tim O'Reilly calls the architecture of participation, in all aspects of what we do, whether that's software development or marketing," added Mohamad. "We believe that when we invest in services that benefit the community, we also strengthen our company. And since developers already trust O'Reilly to help them steer their careers, it seemed like the perfect home for the service."

On O'Reilly Connection, developers build a professional profile that lays out their skills, experience, and network in one place. They can connect with peers and designate "go to" people--other site members whom they consider experts in a particular technology area--and keep tabs on those alpha geeks through personalized watch lists.

Employers can quickly search through O'Reilly Connection to find job or consultant candidates with the specific qualifications they need. Because profiles on O'Reilly Connection display members' networks, they provide a richer picture than a standard resume. During the beta period, O'Reilly Connection is offering free job postings to all members.

"I've been fascinated by the possibilities of social networking, but have been frustrated by the need to build up social network databases from scratch rather than by instrumenting the real social networks that occur in the course of our daily life," said Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media. "We have an active community at O'Reilly--people who read and write our books, who attend and speak at our conferences, and who read and write for the O'Reilly Network. And one of the 'back channel' conversations among all these people is about finding developers to hire, or to help with projects. Could a social networking application help us facilitate these conversations? The O'Reilly Connection is our first stab at answering this question."

About O'Reilly

O'Reilly Media is the premier information source for leading-edge computer technologies. The company's books, conferences, and web sites bring to light the knowledge of technology innovators. O'Reilly books, known for the animals on their covers, occupy a treasured place on the shelves of the developers building the next generation of software. O'Reilly conferences and summits bring alpha geeks and forward-thinking business leaders together to shape the revolutionary ideas that spark new industries. From the Internet to XML, open source, .NET, Java, and web services, O'Reilly puts technologies on the map.

About Greenplum

Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Greenplum is the first company to offer an open source, enterprise-class database for business intelligence to companies of all sizes. The company sponsors The Bizgres Project, a community effort designed to make PostgreSQL the most robust open source database for data warehousing and business intelligence. Greenplum will be releasing a massively parallel version of Bizgres later this year that will support multi-terabyte data volumes at a fraction of the cost traditional data warehouse solutions. The latest version of Bizgres is available for download from www.greenplum.com. For more information about The Bizgres Project, visit www.bizgres.org.