SkySQL, provider of MariaDB technology, has announced three new executive appointments to propel the company into its next phase of growth.

Industry stalwarts Roger Levy of HP, Dion Cornett of Red Hat and Steven Grandchamp of Open Logic have joined the open source database company as it accelerates adoption and expands its enterprise value proposition.

Their focus includes new business development and strategic partnering to take the company to the next level.

Roger Levy, previously general manager of Public Cloud Services at HP joins SkySQL as VP Products, tasked with evolving MariaDB to market leadership by working with the MariaDB engineering teams and community and enterprise customers.

He told CBR: "It’s exciting. I think SkySQL has a lot of tremendous opportunity here to bring another level of innovation into the database arena. What excited me is the tremendous depth and knowledge and talent in the engineering team. You rarely get an opportunity as a start up to see that kind of talent pool that early on.

"There’s some great strategies we’re looking at in terms of how to bring our customers better availability, better scalability better ease of use without them having to be database experts."

He teams up with Dion Cornett, most recently VP Sales Strategy at Red Hat, who brings open source credentials to his new role as VP Global Sales at SkySQL. Cornett leads the continued growth of SkySQL sales and will expand the Company’s routes to market.

To complete the trio of senior hires, Steven Grandchamp joins SkySQL as VP North American Sales. He is the former CEO of OpenLogic, a company providing training and support for enterprises on a range of open source software.

Patrik Sallner, CEO, SkySQL said: "We are pleased to have hired not one, but three world-class talents at such an exciting time of growth and expansion for SkySQL. Roger, Dion and Steven have proven track records of growing open source businesses and delivering results for some of the world’s largest tech companies.

Levy added: "MariaDB now has the opportunity to take over the mantle of innovation in building the next step. MariaDB 10 is coming out with features that are not in MySQL and I think we will take that over and drive the level of database innovation up."