Percona’s Fast-Impact Database Services Aim To Speed AI Readiness

Open-source database software support firm Percona is refocusing its business on structured, services-led engagements aimed at solving performance and AI-readiness challenges for enterprise database teams.

Last month, the company announced the launch of Percona Packages, a suite of structured consulting and support offerings for enterprise IT and DBA teams. The initial offerings — Quickstart, Performance Optimization, and AI Readiness — target critical database challenges with structured, time-bound engagements.

The new packages address the accelerating adoption of AI as enterprises face a critical talent bottleneck. McKinsey reports that 77% of companies lack the data engineering, architecture, and data management skills required to scale data transformations. Meanwhile, IDC estimates that the IT skills gap could cost organizations $5.5 trillion by 2026, driven by shortages in data management, cloud, and AI talent.

According to Percona, this talent crunch leaves teams overstretched, slowing database modernization and increasing the risk of costly downtime, inefficient operations, and stalled AI initiatives. The company’s latest release helps database users eliminate performance roadblocks through optimization and future-proofs databases with AI readiness.

Percona’s new Packages release returns the company to its roots of empowering organizations with database services, CEO Peter Farkas noted.

“Our goal is to be a one-stop shop for open-source database technology, providing support across MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Valkey/Redis, and beyond. These packages tackle the most urgent database challenges while delivering fast, measurable results, so our customers can focus on innovation, not infrastructure headaches,” he explained.

Fast, Measurable Results in 30 Days

One of the primary benefits is the specific, measurable results customers see within the first 30 days, depending on the package and the business problem being addressed, according to Nick Herring, SVP of global services at Percona. Fast results apply to scalability, performance, AI readiness, and overall environmental stability.

“In all cases, these engagements are designed to deliver fast, actionable outcomes,” he told LinuxInsider.

Herring reported that a SaaS provider joined Percona last year due to long-standing performance issues stemming from instability. The company’s staff worked on the problem independently and with other vendors for months without resolution, resulting in a significant impact on customers. Within 30 days, Percona identified a specific bug and solved a recurring issue that others had failed to resolve.

Solves Two Core AI Readiness Challenges

Performance Optimization does not lend itself to a single, universal percentage reduction in query latency. Instead, improvement depends on the customer’s goals, workload characteristics, architecture, and how the application interacts with the database layer, according to Herring. It can address a wide range of performance issues, including slow queries, recurring outages, and failover instability.

“We have eliminated or significantly reduced these problems for customers across on-premises and cloud environments, spanning all major verticals,” he said.

One core challenge is insufficient tuning of the underlying database infrastructure before introducing AI workloads, which compounds the problem. A second hurdle is a lack of familiarity with AI database tooling that leads to configuration problems at the critical intersection of AI workloads and the data they depend on, he explained.

“Our AI Readiness package is designed to proactively address both challenges, helping customers move faster while avoiding costly rework and downstream performance issues,” Herring added.

However, the AI Readiness package is currently limited to PostgreSQL and the pgvector extension. He sees customers most often using PostgreSQL for AI workloads. Thus, Percona is meeting customers where they are.

“We don’t have anything to share yet about our future roadmap to bring AI-ready packages to MySQL or MongoDB. We will continue to evaluate our customers’ and potential customers’ needs, as well as the success of the PostgreSQL AI offering, to inform future plans,” Herring said.

Quickstart Package Perks Up Scaling

Well-known AI companies, gaming companies, financial institutions, and SaaS providers come to Percona to assess the health of their environment after experiencing difficulty scaling with their customer base and new application functionality. Such scaling trouble puts additional strain on their database environment.

“This is where Percona shines, and after these initial engagements, most ultimately become long-term customers of our various services,” he said.

Herring shared that some customers plan to handle their own cloud-to-on-premises migration, a MySQL 5.7-to-8.0 upgrade, or a new Valkey deployment. They look to Percona to reduce risk through expert guidance and validation.

“In these cases, Quickstart is a good fit. However, if customers want a turnkey solution for an upgrade, migration, or new deployment, all but the simplest scenarios demand a greater level of hands-on execution and customization,” he advised.

Designed for Real-World Constraints

Except for the PostgreSQL AI Readiness package, the other Percona Packages apply to all technologies Percona supports: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MariaDB, and Valkey/Redis.

These packages were specifically designed to solve common business challenges our customers face, regardless of technology.