Excerpts from the Sun/MySQL press conference
Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, talked up MySQL's customer list: Facebook, Google, Digg, etc., but also Toyota, IKEA, Southwest Airlines, Nokia.
"The single biggest impediment to MySQLs growth is their ability to give peace of mind to global companies that want to put MySQL into mission-critical deployments."
Marten Mickos, CEO of MySQL [For some reason in Orlando, Florida - was he swimming with dolphins?]:
"Wonderful industry logic underlying this transaction."
"This strengthens our ability to serve our existing customers and to serve our new customers as enterprises migrate over to open-source databases."
Rich Green, EVP, Software, Sun:
"We are perfectly aligned in our business models and cultures. We each have a business model that revolves around free and open access to all of our technology."
"We have overlap in our technologies and underlap in our customers....All of [Sun's] customers are deploying MySQL. [But then stressed that Sun's scale could bring comfort to enterprise customers not yet ready to put MySQL into mission-critical deployments."
From the Q&A:
Tony of Sanford Bernstein: Can you comment on the current financials of MySQL? (Estimates of $60-80 million in 12 months trailing revenues.)
Jonathan asked him to wait until the financial analyst call later today.
What percentage of implementations are on Linux?
1. Linux (by far the most popular platform among MySQL customers). 2. Windows (High number of Windows downloads but most deployments are on Linux). 3. Solaris.
How do you deal with this? If your deployments are on Linux, how does this help Solaris?
Around 20% of MySQL's deployments are on Solaris. About 75% of the Solaris deployments aren't on Sun's hardware. Not only can we bring a breadth of service to MySQL, but we can also help take MySQL into mission-critical environments. We can help move MySQL onto new platforms.
What does this mean for Sun's support for PosgreSQL?
[Jonathan] We have been one of the earliest backers of PostgreSQL and today we reaffirm that commitment.
[Rich] We will continue to invest and drive opportunities for other databases like PostgreSQL.... We have hundreds of developers who work on interoperability with Oracle, too, and will keep doing that. But we will also use that expertise to make MySQL run well on Sun's platforms to drive excellence. [Paraphrasing on that one.]
Will this be a standalone software business?
Our software business is really untethered and decoupled from our systems business....As with Java, Glassfish, etc. we're building a business as broadly as the Internet reaches....If we can sell to new customers...we'll be thrilled to do so. This is good for our margins [as MySQL will help push storage, identity management, and other solutions from Sun]....This is really all about reaffirming Sun's position at the center of the web.
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. 
