Sun Locks Up MySQL, Looks To Future Web Development - InformationWeek

Sun Microsystems have completed its acquisition of MySQL six hebdomads after announcing its purpose to make so. As of today, Marten Mickos, MySQL's former CEO, is now senior VP of a new software system system database group, reporting to Rich Green, executive director VP for software. Sun chief executive officer Jonathan Schwartz said Mickos also will describe directly to him as portion of Sun's senior direction team.

The $1 billion cost of acquiring MySQL was deserving the price, said Schwartz. MySQL "was the crown gem of the unfastened beginning marketplace," with 11 million clients and "the strategical value of gap new marketplaces to Sun," he said in a teleconferencing announcing the closing of the trade on Tuesday.

MySQL is the speedy, unfastened source, Web-page-serving database that's used by Facebook, Google, Slashdot, and other giants of the Web. With Sun's help, MySQL can now defeat what Schwartz termed "the head liability of unfastened beginning companies," supplying 24/7 planetary technical support.

The acquisition "marks the end of a singular epoch for MySQL and the beginning of another singular one," Mickos said at the teleconference. "As portion of Sun, we will turn to function more than clients with larger deployments and larger scalability."

The proclamation was filled with superlatives. "This is the most of import acquisition in Sun's history," said Schwartz, even though Sun's $4.1 billion acquisition of Storage Technologies in June 2005 was much larger. Reminded of StorageTek, Schwartz said, "We don't have got any 2nd ideas about history. MySQL as a database is as much about storage as StorageTek. We're gathering together the most compelling unfastened beginning storage platform in the industry."

Sun is counting on MySQL's continued growing in the $15 billion-a-year database industry to fuel further software system gross sales out of the Sun portfolio, although analysts set MySQL's share of that at somewhere less than $100 million a twelvemonth in revenue. Both Mickos and Schwartz took striving to state that Linux, not Sun's Solaris, will stay MySQL's primary operating system. In fact, MySQL runs on Linux as its most popular platform, with Windows second, and Solaris coming in a distant third. Nevertheless, MySQL was developed on Solaris, said St Simon Phipps, main unfastened beginning military officer at Sun.

At a mass media acme Feb. 13, Schwartz raised some superciliums when he said the popular lamp stack, which includes Linux and MySQL, doesn't have got to be taken literally. Sun will promote developers to utilize Solaris, instead of Linux, with the stack.

Regardless of operating system choice, Schwartz asserted that with MySQL, Sun have a set of software system that more than directly vies with Microsoft's Windows Waiter and SQL Waiter database. "I couldn't hold more than strongly," he told a questioner, when asked if the acquisition conveys Sun closer to head-to-head competition. But Sun will vie on edifice out the adjacent coevals of Web applications for the Internet, not laterality of the desktop.

Sun's Green said it wasn't the right clip to speak about future possibilities stemming from the acquisition, but it wasn't unreasonable to anticipate Sun to more than closely incorporate MySQL with Sun middleware, such as as its GlassFish application waiter project.

As developers construct out Web applications that interact with individual land site visitors, reply inquiries with fresh merchandise information and data, and behavior transactions, Sun desires to be the provider to the endeavor for the network's adjacent phase. Sun bes after to purchase further unfastened beginning companies, but it clearly sees MySQL as the basis of its campaign. It gives Sun an unfastened door to the detergent builders of the adjacent coevals of applications.

That acquisition wasn't only large for Sun, said Schwartz. "It was the most of import acquisition in the industry," he said during the teleconference.