OK, so I've spent the past few days trying to make some sense out of Sun's recent acquisition of MySQL. Where did this come from? What's in it for the involved parties? Is it a good thing? Is it an unmitigated disaster? I'd been holding off writing anything about it until I felt I could answer a few basic questions about the motivations and the implications, but somehow I don't feel like a clear understanding is forthcoming. Fortunately, the lack of plausible theories and coherent ideas isn't prohibitive when it comes to spouting off in the blogosphere.

It's not so hard to understand why this makes sense for MySQL. They've apparently been shopping the company around for some time now (even though all the talk last year was saying IPO), and Sun gave them a lot of good reasons -- a billion of them, to be precise -- to sign on the line which is dotted. They're looking to gain market share in the enterprise with more big installations and, more importantly, by selling more support contracts and tools as a complement to their DBMS. Any potential buyer would need to have an existing presence in the corporate domain with strong global support and sales (especially sales), and if we exclude companies that already have their own competing DB technology, we're really down to just a handful of companies, and Sun just might be the most viable candidate out of all of them.

The incentive to do the deal from the Sun side isn't quite so clear. If we set aside for the moment the possibility that they might be pondering turning MySQL into a commercial product (potentially very profitable, but certainly not consistent with Sun's past behavior and positions on open source) and the additional revenues that would come from selling MySQL support services (the $1 billion purchase price dwarfs the $50 million MySQL took in for 2006), what are you left with? There are only a couple of potential reasons that seem to make any sense here.

  1. They could be trying to gain mind share within the open source infrastructure software domain by controlling the 'M' in LAMP. MySQL is already a big favorite of developers working on small applications and in startups, but so far, it hasn't translated into big money for MySQL AB, so why should we expect that it would now that Sun is in the driver's seat?
  2. They could be making a play for a bigger chunk of the enterprise database market currently dominated by Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. While they offer some of the same bells and whistles as some of the larger commercial vendors and the Web 2.0 wave has given them some large reference implementations to point to as examples of MySQL in high-volume environments (including YouTube, Flickr, and Second Life among others), CIOs still view most open source largely as a risky, experimental venture. (As the saying goes, "No one ever got fired for buying IBM.") Having a company like Sun pimping for them take them some of the way toward improving MySQL's image in corporate IT departments, but it's anyone's guess as to how seriously they'll be taken.
  3. They could be looking at using MySQL as a way of selling other hardware and software products for a profit. Sun produces a diverse line of products, and even though they and MySQL have reaffirmed a commitment to deliver a product that works great on all platforms, there will be a natural temptation to leverage the "close working relationship" between the database development community and Sun's other product development teams to provide a boost.

In the end, it will take years before anyone really knows what to make of this and whether or not it was just simply way, way too much to spend. ($1 billion divided by $50 million per year = 20 years.) It's obvious that the purchase price indicates some speculation about the direction of the market in the coming years on the part of Jonathan Schwartz and Sun's management, all his rhetoric about sharing and supporting notwithstanding, because you've got to sell a hell of a lot of support contracts to pull in that kind of money. Ultimately though, I think that interested observers will find themselves wondering about Sun's Achilles heel since the dot-com days: its ability to execute when presented with a good opportunity. Having just set a $1 billion bet on the table, Sun's investors are going to be looking for some reassurances to that effect very soon.