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Sun-MySQL: So far, so good


By Robert Mullins
July 17, 2008 — 
Soon after the employees of Sweden-based MySQL learned that the company was being acquired by Sun Microsystems, they were asked which elements of MySQL’s corporate culture Sun should preserve. Their answers included the usual “diversity,” “collaboration” and “communication.” But one response stood out: "Singing ‘Helan går.’ ”

“Helan går” is to Swedes what “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” is to Americans: a silly drinking song that for MySQL has become a hallowed, though still silly, tradition. When 400 Sun and MySQL employees met in Orlando on Jan. 16 to announce the acquisition, MySQL employees serenaded their soon-to-be co-workers from Sun with “Helan går” as people from both companies downed shots of vodka. The event is posted on You Tube for posterity.

That bonding exercise set the tone for what has apparently been a smooth process of integrating MySQL’s 400 employees into the 32,000-person Sun work force, while maintaining the progress of work on forthcoming releases of the data management platform.

“We have had no allergic reaction,” declared Marten Mickos, the former MySQL CEO who is now senior vice president of Sun’s Database Group.

Now comes the hard work of making MySQL a competitive database management product that large, established businesses would want to buy, a goal that has proved elusive. Startups and Internet companies such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo love MySQL, but old-school financial services and healthcare enterprises with mission-critical systems are reluctant to trust it.

“I thought we would get to the large corporations on our own, but I must admit that it didn’t happen to us when we were a private company,” said Mickos.

The US$1 billion acquisition also brought MySQL quality assurance resources that were sorely needed. MySQL 5.0, introduced in 2005, was plagued by bugs, and the company was slow to fix many of them, Mickos said. Post-acquisition, 65 Sun engineers joined about 150 MySQL engineers in putting what should have been the finishing touches on MySQL 5.1. But new bugs found in June forced a postponement of the release, which had been scheduled for the end of that month. A production release was expected to ship before Aug. 1, said Zack Urlocker, a MySQL transplant and now vice president for MySQL products at Sun.

It’s not just a matter of throwing bodies at the problem, either. According to Urlocker, the testing of MySQL 5.1 was using five to 10 times as many internally owned servers than MySQL had available for testing when it was a standalone company.

“If you look back to when we shipped 5.0, there was no QA staff,” he quipped. “We couldn’t even spell QA.”

Sun’s ownership also gives MySQL credibility with large business customers that it had lacked, noted Matt Aslett, an enterprise software analyst for The 451 Group. Because MySQL focused on meeting the database requirements for Web-based applications, most of its customer wins were Internet-based companies, while offering a free, open-source version made it a favorite of startups, Aslett said.

Prior to the acquisition, MySQL embarked on a two-year product road map to add features important to large companies and institutions, such as disk-based clustering, online backup and data auditing, Aslett added. With MySQL operating as part of Sun, those features have become increasingly important.

But because MySQL specialized in Web-based applications and lacked a significant support operation, it still hadn’t made much headway in the traditional enterprise market, added Stephen O’Grady, an analyst at the research firm RedMonk.

“MySQL is a phenomenally popular relational database [Web-based applications]. But if we’re talking about high-end mission-critical installations, it’s nowhere near as popular,” O’Grady noted.

Urlocker is already seeing the benefits of Sun’s ability to open once-barred doors. He recently met with potential new customers in Chicago, Cleveland and Milwaukee, noting, “As MySQL, we could not get those kinds of meetings.”

As for MySQL’s employees, they have been left largely untouched by Sun and still have their MySQL.com e-mail addresses. The exception is MySQL’s sales and service staffs, which now report to Sun supervisors. MySQL’s U.S. offices remain in Cupertino, Calif., and Sun’s main offices are in nearby Santa Clara and Menlo Park, Calif.

Although Sun hopes to sell its Solaris operating system to MySQL customers, Sun knows that the most popular OS on which MySQL runs is Linux, followed by Windows, and then Solaris, Mickos said.

“I want all the success for Solaris, but MySQL has a mission to build a database business … that means continued support for Linux and Windows,” Mickos declared.

Although Sun is not going to pressure Linux or Windows users to switch to Solaris, there are other ways to approach the market hand-in-hand with MySQL, said Rich Green, Sun’s executive vice president of software.

MySQL has considerable presence in Internet-based companies, Green noted, and even if the user runs it on Linux, Sun sells x86 servers running Linux, providing synergy on that front. In addition, though many of the Global 500 companies may run legacy IBM or Oracle database software, they are also deploying MySQL on a departmental basis and tend to run that on OpenSolaris, Sun’s open-source version of the operating system. Finally, Sun is seeing some uptick in the use of OpenSolaris at Web 2.0 companies, which Green said could create some sales synergy with Solaris and MySQL.

“But that’s something the market will decide, not any alteration or bias that we’ll project into the market,” Green said.

Sun can also spur MySQL’s adoption by improving the product, said The 451 Group’s Aslett. During the next two years, he noted, MySQL plans to add features such as disk-based clustering, online backup, transparent data encryption and data auditing in future releases. Sun can help accelerate those developments, he added.

The MySQL acquisition was called "the most important acquisition in Sun's history” by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, because it advances Sun’s strategy as an open-source company. If open-source software can stimulate the computer industry, more sales opportunities will be created for Sun servers, services and storage, Schwartz and other executives have noted.

But Sun’s falling stock price shows that the open-source strategy isn’t yet paying off for shareholders. Sun’s stock is trading at under $9 a share, from a high of more than $26 in the first quarter of 2007.

As Aslett noted, “Sun’s strategy relies as much on the patience of its investors as it does on customer adoption of open-source software.”

On July 9, Sun announced plans to cut 1,000 jobs in September in the U.S. and Canada.

Still, Sun considers the MySQL buy a success. MySQL can benefit from Sun’s services operation, Green said, while Sun can learn from MySQL’s 13 years of experience building a business based on open source.

Green’s own proof of the integration’s success: He memorized the lyrics to “Helan går” months ago, on the flight to Orlando.


Related Search Term(s): Databases, open source, Linux, Microsoft, MySQL, Sun


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