Marketing Tools - Wednesday, January 16, 2008 15:15 - 0 Comments

Sun Microsystems Acquires MySQL | Grabs [some] Web 2.0 attention

Congrats to Sun! as Jonathan’s blog points out

But the biggest news of the day is… we’re putting a billion dollars behind the M in LAMP. If you’re an industry insider, you’ll know what that means - we’re acquiring MySQL AB, the company behind MySQL, the world’s most popular open source database.

This acquisition makes me think of other high-profile Sun acquisitions, namely Pirus and StorageTek. No point talking about Pirus. According to an article in techworld, Sun’s storage division is facing continued challenges which means that Sun is stuck trying to make sense of their Storage strategy. Also, apparently Sun’s vision is to get rid of all its data centers by 2015, but who really knows what that means, except the data architect blogger that posted the entry or Jonathan himself.

Going back to the coolest open source DB in the market, MySQL, it would be fantastic to see two of the greatest open technologies have a common thread to them. Java and MySQL can make sparks fly for a startup. However, Sun has been well known for sparking life-changing, mind-boggling technologies and then being unable to capitalize or monetize them.

One great thing about this acquisition is that it landed Sun quite a bit of Web 2.0 attention. But what a price to pay to land a good review by Techrunch.

For what it’s worth, I used to work at Sun a few years back and was able to see how the StorageTek acquisition happened. I enjoyed Sun’s open culture and competitive [yet collaborative] environment. But as someone once told me, Sun is like the wild wild west - stick to your guns because you never know when you will need them.