Friendly Competition within the ClickHouse Ecosystem with Robert Hodges

Sep 18, 2024

Robert Hodges, CEO of Altinity, shares his fascinating journey with ClickHouse, which he didn’t create but embraced when his team needed better scalability. He dives into strategic product decisions, explaining why they chose not to include a certain high-security feature for broader user clarity. The conversation also reveals the friendly competition among multiple companies within the ClickHouse ecosystem, underlining how collaboration can drive open-source innovation while maintaining unique revenue strategies.

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Intro

00:00 • 5min

Navigating the ClickHouse Ecosystem

04:37 • 10min

Navigating Cloud Services for Analytics: Benefits and Challenges

14:19 • 2min

Navigating the Open Source Ecosystem: ClickHouse Insights

16:10 • 22min

Navigating Challenges in Real-Time Analytics Integration

38:28 • 2min

The Joy of Continuous Innovation in Databases

40:41 • 2min

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Robert Hodges, CEO of Altinity. This is a great example of an open source company that is built on top of an open source project, ClickHouse, that they did not create and still do not have direct control over. Altinity has created and maintains other open source projects in the ClickHouse ecosystem as well, but

So many things to unpack with this episode, but a couple I want to call attention to in particular.

The origin story of how Altinity’s founder discovered Clickhouse (he did not create it!). I love how Robert specifies that Alexander Zaitsev, one of the Altinity co-founders, discovered ClickHouse because he wasn’t happy with how the database he was using scaled — and by the way, it had nothing to do with how much the database cost. Great example of an open source project winning because it provided superior value, not because it was/is free.
Making product strategy decisions based on who the ideal user and the ideal customer is. Robert talked about how Altinity didn’t contribute a particular high-security feature back to open source ClickHouse because while it’s something that very security-conscious organizations would want, for an open source users who doesn’t have major security and compliance requirements it would be confusing and create a worse user experience.
Working in friendly competition with the 10 or so other companies that are building around ClickHouse, and how this is one of the unique things about working around open source
How Altinity’s customers tend to value the four freedoms of open source

Are you a leader of an open source company and you’re struggling to prioritize your product roadmap in a way that reinforces your differentiated value… reach out. I help companies figure out the differentiated value of their product and product, where to put the line between the two, and how to use that information to prioritize your roadmap, build a sales narrative and communicate with your market.