CEO & Co-Founder, Redis Labs
Search every verified Ofer Bengal interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Ofer Bengal, co-founder and former CEO of Redis Labs (now Redis), has been discussing the company's evolution from an open-source project to a commercial entity, particularly its licensing changes and competition with major cloud providers. In a March 2025 interview, Bengal stated that Redis and other open-source projects are "not open source anymore" under the Open Source Institute's definition, as they adopted a "source available license" with certain limitations. He described the shift as a response to cloud providers monetizing the open-source code without contributing, saying, "We felt stupid, you know, we are working hard, they don't contribute anything to the open source, they take 95% of the commercial market whereas we take 5%." Bengal also noted that over 50% of Fortune 100 companies are Redis Enterprise customers, and that OpenAI uses Redis to cache repetitive prompts. Bengal has also reflected on Redis's growth and competitive strategy. In a 2023 interview, he discussed the challenge of competing with cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft, and Google, which offer their own Redis services, and described negotiating with cloud providers to have Redis Enterprise counted as part of customers' cloud commitments. In a 2021 keynote, he highlighted partnerships with Google Cloud and Azure, and noted that Redis Enterprise was named a challenger in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for cloud databases. Earlier, in 2018, Bengal said the company was building toward an IPO, projecting it would take about two and a half years, and emphasized Redis Labs' capital efficiency compared to competitors like MongoDB.
“The open source model started with very good intentions which is to enable the masses to enjoy the work of individuals and that was very good in principles until the cloud era.”
“We felt stupid, you know, we are working hard, they don't contribute anything to the open source, they take 95% of the commercial market whereas we take 5%.”
“We came up with another license which is a source available license meaning that anyone can get the source code but it comes with certain limitations.”
“We redesigned the infrastructure layer of Redis so we designed a brand new clustering technology for the product, high availability technology for the product and some other things.”
“Over 50% of Fortune 100 companies are customers of ours with Redis Enterprise and actually more than 50% of Fortune 10 companies, you know, companies like Apple and the like are also customers of ours.”
“OpenAI is a large customer of ours, so they, you know, as you can imagine many prompts by people in the world are repetitive, so instead of running this whole big model over and over again on the same prompt, they cache those prompts and responses.”
“We deal with the fastest NoSQLs which are those NoSQLs entirely served from RAM memory — we are talking about 100,000 transactions per second at sub-millisecond latencies and you need a very specific background and expertise when you're going to do that.”
“We offer the service basically at the same data center as where the user would host the application servers in order to avoid any network latencies — today we offer the service in many data centers of the Amazon Cloud as well as a few data centers of the Microsoft Azure Cloud.”
“We solved problems which are not solved by the open source community — with Redis you are limited in scalability: you cannot grow your data set beyond the single master server, and writing to disk or backing up will degrade performance.”
“One of the things that we do is make sure that you have the best and a stable performance under all circumstances — importantly we offer true high availability with inter-zone replication and multi-zone replication so the application doesn't know about node failures or even full data-center failures.”
“Our services are built in a way that once you register and connect your application to our services there is nothing more you need to do — the service will automatically take care of all the operational tasks like recovering from failures, auto-scaling, and upgrading software.”
“We took another approach which is the database-as-a-service model — it frees the user from all the operational issues and from the need to buy commercial support, because we are the commercial support.”
“We came up with something fresh which is a pay-as-you-go pricing model — we charge according to the actual size of the user's data set, which means you pay only for what you consume and avoid the typical overprovisioning of expensive RAM resources.”
“Most new applications would use a set of three different databases — the traditional MySQL relational databases, MongoDB as a NoSQL database, and Redis; in just three to four years Redis has become one of the most popular databases.”
“By making the core open source, anyone can download it and use it.”
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RedisConf 2021 The time for real-time data is now! Join Redis Co-Founder and CEO, Ofer Bengal, and Co-Founder and CTO, Yiftach Shoolman, as they share the vision, strategy, and some exciting news about Redis. Mike Lee, head of payments architecture from Capital One, shares his story on how Redis Enterprise is used as a driving force in the bank’s real-time payments architecture. After the keynote, we unwind with fireside chats hosted by John Furrier from theCUBE to get the key stories behind the news. Try free at https://redislabs.com/try-free
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