Executive Summary:
Sun Technologies' acquisition of MySQL shows that the company is moving away from its hardware base and establishes it as a major open-source database vendor.
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For at least the past decade (which is ages in
the IT industry), the big three players in the
database market have been Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft—
in that order. In 2006, a Gartner database
research report lumped MySQL with all the rest of
the open-source database vendors at the bottom of
the list, and together they held 7.9 percent of the
database market. Now, Sun Microsystems’ January
2008 purchase of the rapidly growing open-source
database vendor MySQL has the potential to
change the database market. Some pundits question
Sun’s purchase, saying that Sun won’t make
any money off of open source and that the company
would have been much better off purchasing
an established commercial database product as a
way to enter the database market. But I believe the
combination of Sun and MySQL makes a development
platform that the other database vendors
can’t ignore.
If nothing else, MySQL is certainly a good investment
for Sun. Although MySQL, the database,
is in some sense free, like all commercial opensource
products, it’s not completely free. MySQL,
the company, makes revenue from enterprise support
and MySQL management products. Overall,
the MySQL market is large with an estimated eight
million active MySQL installations. Plus, MySQL
sales have grown at a steady, if not impressive, rate
of 100 percent per year. Sun certainly sees this as a
large, new customer base.
Revenue isn’t the primary motivator behind
Sun acquiring MySQL. I see the MySQL purchase
as a way to position Sun for the future. I think
that Sun’s willingness to invest a cool $1 billion for
MySQL shows that Sun considers the purchase
of MySQL to be a strategic move. Although Sun
is primarily a hardware vendor, it’s clear that the
company is transitioning away from its proprietary
hardware base. Sun recently began supporting
x64 and is even offering several AMD-based servers
with Windows Server 2003 as an OS option.
Sun’s billion dollar baby instantly establishes the
company as a major open-source database vendor,
supporting open-source OSs, Windows Server, and
its Solaris OS.
From the development and platform perspective,
Sun’s acquisition of MySQL is a great complement
to Java. Java has long been established as the
preferred development language for Linux, and its
cross-platform support is very appealing to many
open-source developers. And MySQL, holding 49
percent of the open-source database market, is the
database of choice for most Linux and open-source
projects. The combination of Java and MySQL is
the open-source equivalent of Microsoft’s .NET
Framework and SQL Server.
So what does Sun’s purchase of MySQL mean
to SQL Server and the database market in general?
First, Sun’s acquisition helps legitimatize MySQL
as an enterprise-capable database. Sure, MySQL
has been around and is well known in the low-end of the database market, and even many big companies
such as Google, Yahoo!, and craigslist.com
use MySQL. Even so, MySQL has never been a
real contender in the enterprise database arena.
Sun’s ownership of MySQL will change that perspective
immediately, although the change will
likely affect Oracle more than it will SQL Server.
Sun is one of Oracle’s primary hardware vendors,
and owning MySQL will probably weaken Sun’s
support for Oracle. MySQL will continue to offer
stiff competition to SQL Server Express, although
its questionable .NET integration capabilities and
lack of business intelligence (BI) tools will keep it
from being any real threat to the commercial version
of SQL Server.
End of Article
