Open season

By Mårten Mickos, CEO of MySQL AB

CXO. How do you see the enterprise infrastructure evolving?
Mårten Mickos. If we start from the fundamentals, there is exponential growth in Internet users and mobile phone users worldwide. The former have recently exceeded one billion and the latter will soon reach three billion.

Although those trends are primarily consumer-based, they do drive enterprise trends. Goldman Sachs noted in a research report in 2006 that "the on-going shift to more web-based applications is unstoppable".

As the world is increasingly going online, Web 2.0 technologies are morphing into what we call Enterprise 2.0 technologies. SAP Chairman Hasso Plattner noted in 2007 that SAP would work with Web 2.0 and wiki technologies, to the benefit of their customers. So we should expect the leading providers of enterprise solutions to include an increasing amount of modern web technologies in their offerings.

Another aspect of the world going online is that not all enterprise applications need to be run on premise any more. The very rapid growth of the Software as a Service (SaaS) market is an indication that corporations trust their vendors with mission-critical applications. A hundred years ago it was a bold decision to start using electricity from the utility company and leave aside your own generator. A similar trend is now visible for enterprise applications. Companies like RightNow, Omniture, F-Secure and others are providing powerful solutions to their customers – as a service!

If you take these mega trends and apply them to the database industry, you will notice that a new kind of DBMS is needed. The online database must provide instant access, low latency, and high performance. It must be easy to deploy in an experimental setting, but it must also scale to the massive use that success will bring. This is also the reason why large and traditional enterprises are nowadays visiting Google and other similar web properties to learn how to scale out their IT infrastructure without incurring significant cost and without being locked into a proprietary vendor.

CXO. How is MySQL positioned to address such an evolution?
MM. MySQL is the only mainstream database that was designed specifically for the online world. Whereas other DBMS vendors were focused on serving the old paradigm of a limited number of clerks using the database, MySQL has been designed to be able to serve millions of online users.

It is no coincidence that Google runs its revenue-generating machine, its ad-serving system, on MySQL, or that telecom equipment manufacturers such as Alcatel-Lucent or Nokia-Siemens Networks are building their next generation network infrastructure on MySQL technology.

CXO. What are the key benefits IT decision makers are deriving from their use of open source and MySQL?
MM. The first attractor to open source is typically price. The savings are so compelling that CIOs just have to consider open source. For example, the Swedish National Police standardized on an open source infrastructure on commodity hardware and is expecting at least 50 percent savings over the next five years as a result.

But once a corporation starts using open sources solutions, they will see that there are other benefits as well: performance and reliability (open source software generally having fewer bugs), the ability to easily modify and integrate the software modules, and the lack of lock-in, and so on.

CXO. What advice would you give to those hesitant to implement MySQL for mission critical applications?
MM. If someone is truly hesitant to implement MySQL for a mission-critical application, then I would probably recommend that person not to do it. And soon enough such a person or organization will notice that all their competitors are indeed using open source (and winning) and by that time the hesitations typically go away. There will always be an early majority and laggards. The laggards may have an easier life, but it is the early majority who will be the most successful.

To help overcome any hesitations, I would recommend studying companies in the same space or industry. MySQL has thousands of successful customers and we are happy to introduce them to each other. One sign of success of our customers, by the way, is the excellent exit opportunities that they have had. Google, Flickr, YouTube, Zimbra, Blue Lithium, SurfControl, Hyperion, TellMe, Fotolog are some of the most successful IPOs or acquisitions in recent times, and they all run important applications on MySQL. And so does Facebook too.

Mårten Mickos joined took up his position at MySQL in 2001. Under his leadership, the company has grown from a start-up to the second-largest independent vendor of open source software in the world. Prior to MySQL, Mickos held multi-national CEO and senior executive positions in his native Finland. He holds a M.Sc. in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology.