O'Reilly and Greenplum Launch Beta of O'Reilly Connection

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: August 3, 2005
Contact: Sara Winge, sara@oreilly.com, 707-827-7109
Emily Swanson, Breakaway Communications, 415-377-9766, eswanson@breakawaycom.com


O'Reilly Media and Greenplum Launch Beta of O'Reilly Connection at OSCON

New jobs and networking site "unites the global geekforce"

OSCON, Portland, OR--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
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."

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About O'Reilly

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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.