Open-source database market shows muscles
While Sun Microsystems' MySQL gets the limelight, with its 55 percent quarterly billings increase, other open-source database competitors like Ingres and Enterprise are also doing well.
Ingres on Tuesday reported a significant uptick in its 2008 revenue, climbing 32 percent to $68 million over $52 million in 2007. EnterpriseDB didn't provide revenue numbers, but it also recently reported a banner year, with greater than 50 percent growth in new customer accounts and "comparable bookings growth."
New Ingres customers in 2008 include Air Enterprises, Allied Express, Banca IFIS SpA, BBP Partners, CondeNast Publications, Connected Wedding, C&K Market, Lechler, Les Salins du Midi, LYNX Services, Volcano, SunPower and the US Coast Guard. Ingres counts over 10,000 enterprise customers, including 136 of the Fortune 500 companies like 3M, BAE Systems, Cypress Semiconductor, and Lufthansa.
As for EnterpriseDB, in 2008 it added The Los Angeles Times, hi5 Networks, OptionsHouse, LLC, and Backcountry.com as customers. Existing customers include FTD, Moody's Investor Services, TD Ameritrade, Juniper Networks, McKesson, and others.
It's good to see the open-source database market growing, generally, and not merely MySQL. It's not a market if it's owned by one (relatively small) company. But a bevy of such companies...? That's a market worth watching.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
