Seattle’s Blue Gecko has been acquired by datAvail, creating one of the largest providers of remote database administration services in the U.S. Blue Gecko provides database administration support for Oracle, MySQL and other products.

“It’s a pretty big problem since good database administrators are really difficult to find,” said Blue Gecko CEO Chuck Edwards, who co-founded the company with JJ Ecker and Sarah Novotny in 2001.

Both Edwards and Ecker are former database administrators at Amazon.com.

“We kind of came up as Oracle/Unix people in Microsoft’s backyard. So, it has always been a little strange for our customers, and for everybody that we didn’t provide that much Microsoft support,” Edwards tells GeekWire. “DatAvail has grown up as mostly a Microsoft shop, so we are going to be able to provide a tremendous amount of Microsoft support here locally where we haven’t been able to do that before. So, we are targeting a huge amount of growth right here in Seattle based on our ability to support Microsoft SQL Server.”

Blue Gecko will operate as a subsidiary of datAvail, which is based in Broomfield, Colorado. About 75 percent of Blue Gecko’s customer base is in the Pacific Northwest, and the company has operated profitably since it was founded.

The company’s staff of 20 will stay in place as a result of the acquisition, including Edwards.

“We are a pretty lean team as it is, but part of what they wanted was our expertise. They wanted our people,” he said.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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