The European Commission may be taking its time analyzing the competitive impact of Oracle's proposed acquisition of Sun/MySQL, but the industry can't afford to dither. On Tuesday, MySQL competitor EnterpriseDB announced that Red Hat joined its $19 million Series C funding round, which follows IBM's own investment in EnterpriseDB.
Is the software industry, once devoted to MySQL, preparing to shift allegiances to Postgres?
Probably not, but clouds are forming. On Monday, I talked with EnterpriseDB CEO Ed Boyajian, a former Red Hat executive, and he suggested several reasons for Red Hat's investment of "a significant amount of money" in the open-source database vendor, EnterpriseDB. As he told me:
This is a great step forward for our company and for Postgres. Red Hat has done heroic work bringing commercial open source to mainstream enterprise adoption. And it's making a difference: arguably billions of dollars of spend in operating system and middleware has gone back to customers. You want to talk about returning control to users? That's the real yardstick. That's real disruption.
For EnterpriseDB to have the trust and support of Red Hat as a partner and investor is a huge help to our company and I think it gives another strong indication to enterprise customers challenging their old spending habits, that there is more they can do.
It's important to note that Red Hat has been distributing Postgres for some time. It's in every copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora that Red Hat ships. As such, it's already in the hands of thousands of Red Hat customers and users, and is in heavy demand in some geographies, particularly Latin America. But until now Red Hat has not provided robust support for the database on par with its support for Linux and JBoss.
That's about to change.
The change is good for Red Hat customers, but this isn't the only area in which Red Hat has been seeking to expand its influence. Red Hat has been actively looking for opportunities to invest in a variety of open-source companies, most recently investing in JasperSoft.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, however, nicely marries pragmatism with idealism, as suggested by his comments on EnterpriseDB's subscription model:"EnterpriseDB is also working to create customer value through a subscription support model. Clearly, this is a model we see as beneficial."
He's right, but it's interesting to hear him laud a model (i.e., a subscription to proprietary and open-source software, plus maintenance and support) from which he distanced Red Hat in Red Hat's Q1 earnings call. ("I certainly hope for and we certainly like to work with other open source companies out there. But those are fundamentally different business then what we're doing.")
He's right the second time (in the EnterpriseDB news release). They are not fundamentally different business models. I suspect his comments on the earnings call reflected an attempt to get out of an inaccurate and misleading question from the ever-entertaining Trip Chowdhry.
Regardless, Red Hat's investment in Postgres vendor EnterpriseDB suggests that it, along with IBM and others, is prepared to bolster alternatives to MySQL in its larger quest to provide real competition in the database industry.
To be fair, Red Hat's interest in Postgres and EnterpriseDB precedes the EU's intervention in Oracle's proposed acquisition of MySQL. The interest is understandable: Postgres is a great choice for a wide variety of database workloads. It's built for transactions and higher-end use cases, like the Oracle and IBM database workloads that it can replace (or augment).
EnterpriseDB plays into Red Hat's overarching strategy of commoditizing key infrastructure, as Whitehurst has noted. Given that the $20 billion database market is concentrated in just three vendors who control 85 percent of the market, databases are ripe for disruption, disruption that Red Hat can feed from a distance.
Red Hat's investment in EnterpriseDB says more about Red Hat's increasing awareness of its larger role in the open-source ecosystem than it does of any competition with MySQL. It's about time.
There are certain things that open-source and Software as a Service (SaaS) companies increasingly need, and which a new crop of vendors is rising to provide.
On the one hand, as JasperSoft's recent outsourcing of its forge software demonstrates, open-source companies need a place in which they can engage their community. (SaaS companies like Salesforce.com are increasingly doing the same thing, e.g., AppExchange.)
But subscription-based vendors also need subscription management tools (e.g., OCS), as well as "networks" to deliver updates, add-ons, and more, such as Bitrock is providing.
We're at the early, formative stages of this "enablement" market, but it's starting to feel like it could be offer real value in the midst of a gold rush. Much as the vendors of pickaxes and shovels reaped hefty rewards from the Forty-Niners so, too, could the Hyperics, Bitrocks, etc. of the world stand to clean up as the world moves to open source and SaaS models, even if only in part.
Why? Because these services enable add-on, proprietary value. In an open world, having a differentiated product to sell alongside the completely open version matters a great deal, as Savio consistently argues. There's a time and season for it - phases of open-source growth - but it's going to come.
When it does, the enablers may well make as much or more than those they enable.
Well, that didn't take long. Barry Klawans, former CTO at JasperSoft, resigned from Jasper a month or so ago citing the need to unwind and spend time with his family.
Apparently, six weeks of that was all his family could stand, as he has joined Hyperic (on a part-time basis) to help with its JasperSoft integration. His kids are crying...
...with relief!
Welcome back, Barry. If your kids are like mine, you'll never leave us for long. :-)
And things were going so well, too.
On the day that JasperSoft proclaimed itself the king of Business Intelligence with 8,000 paid customers and 80,000 active deployments, I found out that Barry Klawans, its CTO, had left the company. When I asked him why he had left, he responded that he had "left simply to unwind, no reflection on the company at all."
Fair enough. After 25 years of relentless startup life, it's not surprising that he'd want to revisit his family and life. (I'd recommend skiing in Utah. We got another two feet last week. :-)
As for JasperSoft, I also talked with a Business Objects executive today who mentioned that he never sees JasperSoft, Pentaho, or Actuate in any of his accounts or sales opportunities. To this I responded, "It's just a matter of time." Fortunately for him, he'll get a reprieve from Barry for awhile. :-)
Best of luck to Barry in whatever you choose to do, my friend.
Disclosure: I am an advisor to JasperSoft.
I recently caught up with Brian Gentile, JasperSoft's new CEO, to get his take on the rampant industry consolidation in the Business Intelligence world, where JasperSoft competes. I also asked him about his favorite open-source software (shouldn't have, as you'll see :-) and whether open-source interoperability is a "must have" for his customers.
With more than 2.5 million downloads worldwide and more than 7,000 commercial customers in 96 countries, JasperSoft is on a roll. But with Pentaho getting $12 million more in funding, there's no easy sailing for JasperSoft. I wanted to see how Brian was planning to navigate the difficult dynamics of his industry.
Q: You joined JasperSoft just a couple of months ago. What have you been working on?
BG: Well, I've been on the JasperSoft board for more than two years, so I came to the table in many ways ready to go. I think JasperSoft's opportunity is in its ability to offer choice and flexibility in a market where customers are facing the realities of hegemony: fewer choices, higher costs and little innovation. It's true that choice and flexibility are inherent features of open-source software, but in the BI market, where consolidation is at an all-time high, it's more relevant than ever.
... Read more
Ian Howells, Alfresco's chief marketing officer, did some analysis of the company's customer and user community, and I found the results interesting. I've been hearing rumblings for some time that Windows increasingly serves as a great evaluation platform for open source, 
but most companies use Linux when they're serious and want to go into production. Ian's data confirmed this, and more. (Zmanda has published data that corroborates our findings.)
First of all, the Alfresco data shows that Windows is plays a healthy role in the open source ecosystem. (In the graph, Windows = green, and Linux = blue, in case you can't see it well.) We have plenty of companies going into production with open-source Alfresco sitting on top of closed-source Windows. From my work with SugarCRM, JasperSoft and others, I know the same holds true for them. I don't suspect that this is going to change anytime soon.
Windows plays a large role because it's the OS sitting on the most desktops. But when customers are serious about production, the majority favor Linux. Again, I think you'd find very similar results were you to talk with MuleSource, Funambol, SugarCRM, etc.
... Read more
I spent a half-hour this morning talking with Lance Walter, VP of Marketing for Pentaho, a leading open source Business Intelligence vendor. I wanted to see if Pentaho's experience in the market matches up with what other open source application companies are seeing.
Indeed. The good news of open source goes well beyond any one particular vendor.
Question: I hear good things about Pentaho all the time. Can you give me a high-level update?
... Read more
Matthew Aslett is highlighting four open source startups to watch: Aptar, GravityZoo, Loopfuse, and Untangle. I've talked about Loopfuse and Untangle before, but Aptar and GravityZoo are news to me.
That's one of the great things about the commercial open source ecosystem right now. People can complain that there aren't enough (public) examples of success yet, but one of the great examples of general commercial open source success is that there are so many new companies getting funded and/or getting traction. This is a vibrant, growing ecosystem.
Growing in breadth, but also growing in depth. ... Read more
Paul Doscher, CEO of JasperSoft, has proved me wrong. Two years ago when I joined as an advisor to JasperSoft, I worried that a company so new to open source (despite the Jasper community on which it was built) would struggle to truly get open source religion.
Paul, however, has adeptly made the shift from CEO to open source CEO, with JasperSoft doing exceptionally well in the market in consequence. In this eighteenth installment of our Open Source CEO Series, I talked with Paul about the transition.
Name, position, and company of executive
... Read more
Paul Doscher, President and CEO, JasperSoft, an open source Business Intelligence company.
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