MySQL acquired by Sun

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.

Tagged as: ceo, cloud, data, e-commerce, enterprise, Google, Linux, MySQL, open-source, server, software, sun