Our history

When Neil Davidson and Simon Galbraith founded Redgate Software in 1999, they had three goals in mind:

• To work together to do something they found personally fulfilling
• To create software that made a technical contribution to the market and to the working lives of users
• To build a company culture that represented their moral values and who they were as people – this was in reaction to having worked in places where the humanity of the organization’s employees was seen by their managers as an annoying inconvenience

They started work initially creating bug tracking, load testing and code profiling tools for .NET applications. In his spare time, Neil Davidson also developed a small piece of software to resolve an issue he found particularly irritating – how to compare the differences between a database in development and a database in production and create a deployment script in minutes.

SQL Compare was the result and, nearly twenty years after it was first released, it remains the industry standard for deploying changes to SQL Server databases. Its success also encouraged Redgate to look at other complex, time-consuming and laborious tasks that database development throws up, and create solutions to resolve them.

The approach, which Redgate calls ‘ingeniously simple’, became the trademark of Redgate’s software and over the years it added a range of solutions to its database development portfolio, covering everything from writing SQL code faster to masking data.

It's not just about the software

Redgate’s 20-year journey has been about a lot more than software. Remember the company culture and the moral values goal? This has been central to the company and a major contributor to the success of Redgate.

Quite simply, people matter. Give them a results-driven culture that blames anyone who fails to deliver, or a bureaucratic one that forces everyone to follow a rulebook, and innovation will be crushed, ambition defeated.

Give them, instead, a culture that is open to new ideas, encourages cooperation and collaboration, and focuses on doing the right thing, not the easy thing, and good things happen. Because people feel part of the process rather than alien from it.

Whether in development, support, marketing or sales, Redgate people try to make a difference and the result is that the company has expanded far beyond its headquarters in Cambridge. It now has offices in Pasadena and Austin in the US, as well as Brisbane and Berlin, employs around 400 people and has been repeatedly recognized as a great place to work.