Percona partnerships pro puts product power & preference prerogative in pole position
Percona used its Percona Live 2026 Americas conference this week to detail its developer-centric approach for go-to-market contacts and connections.
While individual software application developers won’t always be thinking about partnership networks (until they need them), the formulation of inter-relationships between technology vendors is what underpins tool integration and interoperability.
The man who goes to bed dreaming about this kind of issue at Percona is Louis Hood, the company’s newly appointed director of global partnerships and channels. Hood is known for his work that has focused on building and scaling partner ecosystems across cloud, data and enterprise technology.
The power of P
Our alliterative headline here is down to the fact that in running Percona’s global partner program, Hood says he is dedicated to helping users move faster without giving up choice or control – in other words, Percona partnerships pro puts product power & preference prerogative in pole position.
“Most organisations are operating across hybrid and multi-cloud environments while trying to manage rising costs and growing complexity,” said Hood. “Percona’s open approach gives them a different path: more flexibility, better control over cost and infrastructure and no lock-in. The way is open and our partner programme should reflect that – focused, strategic and built around outcomes that matter.”
In terms of his mission, Hood will build on the company’s relationships across cloud providers, global systems integrators (GSIs), independent software vendors (ISVs) and value-added resellers (VARs) 0 oh yes and hyperscalers too.
Open source database expertise
His focus will be set on high-impact partnerships that make Percona’s open source database expertise easier for customers to access, apply and scale.
“Customers want more control over their data infrastructure, not more complexity or lock-in,” said Peter Farkas, CEO of Percona. “Louis understands how to build disciplined partner ecosystems that create measurable customer value. His leadership will help us make Percona’s open source solutions more accessible, easier to scale and harder for the market to ignore.”
Prior to Percona, Hood was FinOps cloud lead at Tangoe, a leading IT asset and expense management provider, where he helped organisations to optimise cloud spend and align technology investments with business priorities.
He has also held key roles at SoftServe and CDW, where he led strategic alliances and developed and executed go-to-market initiatives across cloud and emerging technologies.
Under the hood with Hood
Computer Weekly Developer Network (CWDN) spoke to Hood in person at Percona Live 2026 in Mountain View this month for a deeper dive into his remit and realm.
CWDN: How will partnerships work in practice at Percona… and what kinds of opportunities will partners be able to take on in future?
Hood: Our partnership strategy is designed to be practical, scalable and mutually beneficial by aligning technologies, go-to-market strategies and customer engagement models to deliver stronger solutions and new revenue opportunities.
The initial focus is on technical integration, joint validation and enablement to ensure the combined offering meets customer needs around performance, security and scalability.
From there, opportunities expand into:
- Joint go-to-market and co-selling.
- Managed services and support.
- Migration and modernisation projects.
- Consulting and implementation services.
- Industry-specific solutions.
- Cloud and hybrid deployments.
The long-term value comes from building recurring services and strategic advisory relationships — not just reselling technology. As adoption grows, partners can help shape integrations, roadmap priorities and future enterprise solutions, creating shared growth across the ecosystem.
Percona’s Hood: A strong database partner helps shift organisations from reactive troubleshooting to proactive visibility through monitoring, observability and performance analysis.
CWDN: With companies concerned about data sovereignty and IDC predicting that there will be $400 billion spent on sovereignty by 2030, how can channel companies help their customers understand what might need to be moved or re-implemented?
Hood: Data sovereignty is becoming a major business and compliance priority… and many customers still lack visibility into where their data resides and how regulations apply across cloud and hybrid environments. Channel partners can help by assessing workloads, identifying which data must remain local and guiding customers on what should be moved, modernised, or re-architected. This includes helping balance compliance, security, performance and operational flexibility.
It also creates long-term opportunities for partners around consulting, migration services, managed operations and compliance support. The key value is helping customers stay compliant without losing agility or innovation.
CWDN: Databases can be complex and tuning requires real expertise. How can you recognise that your customer has a problem in the first place?
Hood: Customers usually notice database problems indirectly through slow applications, inconsistent performance, failed transactions, rising costs, or operational instability. Because databases sit at the core of the application stack, issues are often misdiagnosed as application, network, or infrastructure problems first.
A strong database partner helps shift organisations from reactive troubleshooting to proactive visibility through monitoring, observability and performance analysis. Metrics like query latency, replication lag, indexing efficiency and workload behaviour help identify whether issues are architectural, configuration-related, or operational.
Expertise also matters. Modern hybrid and cloud database environments are complex and experienced engineers can quickly recognise patterns and resolve issues efficiently.
More importantly, organisations need to understand the business impact:
- Downtime affecting revenue
- Poor performance is hurting customer experience
- Overprovisioning increases cloud costs
- Operational inefficiencies are slowing development
The most successful organisations treat database performance and reliability as strategic priorities, supported by proactive assessment, automation and expert guidance.
CWDN: Open source software is great because anyone can use it. But how can you build a business around what is free and how can you keep that sustainable over time?
Hood: Open source succeeds commercially when companies stop treating the code as the product and instead monetise the value around it – reliability, security, scalability, governance and support.
Successful models typically include:
- Managed cloud/SaaS offerings.
- Enterprise security and compliance.
- Premium support and SLAs.
- Integrations and partnerships.
- Consulting and training.
- Operational and governance tooling.
Customers are not paying for the code itself; they’re paying for reduced risk, faster deployment and operational confidence.
Long-term success depends on building both a strong community and a differentiated enterprise value layer. Partnerships with cloud providers, GSIs, ISVs and security vendors are especially important for expanding adoption and driving enterprise revenue.
The key balance is staying open enough to encourage adoption while differentiating enough to sustain continued innovation. When done well, open source becomes the industry platform others build on.