Interview with Kangaroot
Find out more about Kangaroot
Any views or opinions represented or expressed in this interview belong solely to the interviewee and do not neccessarily represent those of the PGDay Lowlands 2026 organisation, PostgreSQL Europe, or the wider PostgreSQL community, unless explicitly stated.
An introduction about the company and the interview.
Describe your company in brief and tell us how its core values align
with those of the Postgres community.
Kangaroot is a Belgian open source consultancy & managed services company with over 25 years of experience, active across Belgium & the Netherlands. We help organisations design, implement & run open source infrastructure; from Linux & containers to databases, security & observability. We're not tied to a single vendor or platform; we advise across the full stack.
We don't build products; we build practices. Our database practice combines PostgreSQL expertise with partnerships with EDB for enterprise-grade deployments & DBtune for AI-driven performance optimization. What makes it stand out is that we're not selling a single solution; we help customers find the right fit for their environment.
That independence is what connects us to the PostgreSQL community. Postgres thrives because no single company owns it & we operate the same way. Our value is in expertise & trust, not in lock-in.
How did you choose to build your business around PostgreSQL? When did it
happen?
PostgreSQL wasn't a deliberate pivot, it was a natural arrival & one that happened more than 20 years ago. As a generalist open source partner, we follow where our customers' data goes. PostgreSQL was already proving itself as the serious, reliable alternative to proprietary databases and we built the expertise to support customers through that transition properly. That foundation has only grown since.
What does your company care for most as a business? Tell us more about
the philosophy behind it.
"Ontzorgen", a Dutch word that roughly translates as "taking away someone's worries." That's our mission. We take full responsibility for the open source infrastructure we help build & run. Customers shouldn't have to worry about their database at 3am; that's what we're there for.
Name the most valuable contributions that your company has shared with
the community.
We contribute primarily through knowledge sharing & community building. A good example: we organised OPEN for GOV, a biannual event bringing together IT experts from Belgium's open source community & the public sector. At the 2024 edition, focused entirely on databases, Smals shared how they're migrating away from Oracle, with nearly 4500 databases of which 18% already on PostgreSQL. A real conversation between practitioners, not a vendor pitch. (kangaroot.net/news/kicking-out-oracle-open-source-database-smarter-choice)
Why did you choose to support PGDay Lowlands this year? What makes this
conference special?
PGDay Lowlands has built something rare: a conference that feels genuinely community-driven, not vendor-driven. The hallway track is as valuable as the talks. We're active in both Belgium & the Netherlands & this is the PostgreSQL event in our home market; supporting it felt obvious.
Which approach would make Postgres thrive in the AI-driven world?
Pragmatism over hype. pgvector is a strong start, but the real opportunity is in making PostgreSQL the reliable, auditable, sovereign foundation for AI workloads especially for organisations in regulated sectors that can't just push everything to a US cloud provider. That's a story PostgreSQL is well positioned to tell.
How would you describe the PostgreSQL community in 3 words? Why?
Generous. Rigorous. Independent.
Generous because knowledge sharing is the default, not the exception. Rigorous because the bar for quality; in code & in conversation; is genuinely high. Independent because no single vendor owns the room, and everyone seems to want to keep it that way.
