The New York Times reported on 17 January 2008 that Sun is acquiring MySQL for US$1 billion. Sun will use MySQL’s technology and customer list to facilitate an entry into the US$15 billion database market.
I use MySQL to run billso.com. I am hoping that Sun will not change the company’s open source business model. Jeff Gould of Interop News asks an important question – did Sun pay too much? MySQL reported revenues of US$70 million last year. By Gould’s estimate, Sun needs to grow MySQL to US$500 million in sales revenue for this acquisition to work.
Regardless, Sun CEO Jon Schwartz claims his company is the largest OSS firm in the world. Sun now has an important piece of the LAMP stack – that’s the Linux kernel, the Apache web server, MySQL and the Perl, Python and PHP programming languages. This InfoWorld article has some additional background on the acquisition, and why LAMP is a very important piece of the Web, e-commerce and enterprise information systems.
See my article from 25 October 2007 for information about MySQL’s software development pact with Google.
Tags: ceo, cloud, data, e-commerce, enterprise, Google, Linux, MySQL, open-source, server, software, sun
