Just days after finalizing the acquisition of MySQL, the former CEO of open source database firm MySQL Marten Mickos told Computer Business Review that the deal is already boosting the firm's business.

"As soon as the deal closed we immediately secured a big deal with a major European national police agency," Mickos reported. "Key to them choosing MySQL was that we are now part of a much larger public corporation. The deal wouldn't have happened when we were private."

Additionally, free downloads of MySQL have increased by approximately 10,000 per day, from an estimated 50,000 per day before the deal was announced to around 60,000. Reportedly, 67,000 copies were downloaded on March 3rd alone.

"My own estimate is that of those 60,000, around 6,000 are new, active installations," said Mickos, who now holds the position of senior vice president of database technology at Sun. "Even that is a staggering volume."

CBR's Jason Stamper asked Mickos to estimate how many of those 6,000 will eventually buy MySQL Enterprise with its monitoring tools, support and subscription.

"I would say the ratio is between one in one hundred and one in one thousand," said Mickos. "If you look at averages you get useless information, because we might get 10 million downloads in China and we know almost none of them will pay anything in the near future. In the web 2.0 space, most will pay. In countries with a high GDP, many will pay, and in those with a low economy absolutely nobody will pay today."

Whether or not a user pays, Mickos contends there are benefits from these downloads, including bug fixes, articles, community input, etc.

The other profit-maker Sun is hoping to cash in on are the hardware and service needs of MySQL users, and Mickos says when non-paying customers scale up their databases is when Sun will see these pay off.

"When customers come to us for the first time there is no denying they come to us because we're free," said Mickos. "And at that stage they will run it on the cheapest, crappiest hardware they can find because they have no money. There's no business for any hardware firm there; not even Dell would make any money there. But although they start frugal, for many of them they then scale to the next level and that's when they start buying stuff."

He cites Google and Facebook, two of MySQL's biggest customers, as prime examples. "In open source we say fail fast, scale fast. Many web 2.0 ideas will fail, but when Google or Facebook get it right they suddenly need to scale like crazy," Mickos said. "Open source is the only model where they can scale fast on exactly the same code base; it's the same product." [...read more...]

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