Sun's MySQL Buy Targets Oracle, Microsoft

Sun Microsystems set the stage for a heavyweight database battle with one-time close partner Oracle and longtime rival Microsoft with its $1 billion acquisition of open source database kingpin MySQL AB.

Sun CEO and President Jonathan Schwartz said the purchase puts Sun at the heart of the "$15 billion database market." He called it "the most important acquisition Sun has made in the history of the company."

Schwartz said the deal brings an "enormous wrath of new customers and opportunities" to Sun, including the prospect of increased margins for itself and partners as companies buy Sun servers and storage as part of a full MySQL solution. Sun indicated that it will move quickly to optimize the MySQL database on Sun servers and storage devices.

"You may have noticed that when MySQL is put into deployment it is often surrounded by application infrastructure and identity infrastructure and there is a 100 percent attach rate also to a server and a storage device," said Schwartz. "Databases are used to store information as well as to run analytics and deliver applications. As we build out those businesses, it improves the economics of our overall business as well as expands our service line."

"This is really all about one thing, which is reaffirming Sun's position at the center of the Web," said Schwartz. "We view ourselves as a platform for the Web economy."

Sun executives claimed the deal will not affect the Oracle relationship or even Sun's longtime endorsement and support of the open source PostgreSQL database.

Rich Green, executive vice president of software for Sun, who will oversee the MySQL business, downplayed the competition with Oracle. He said Sun has spent many years in partnership with Oracle with hundreds and hundreds of engineers that work with Sun to optimize the Oracle database on Sun servers. "We are going to keep investing in that and keep doing that," he said. "It is vital to our customers. It is vital to our business, but we can also use that expertise and share that expertise to optimize MySQL technology to run on Sun systems as well as Linux and Windows systems."

As for the PostgreSQL conflict, Schwartz noted Sun's position as "one of the earliest backers" of PostgreSQL and reaffirmed Sun's commitment to that open source product. "We believe in the future of open source databases so much so we just put $1 billion behind one of them," he said. "We are firmly committed to figuring out the ways we can optimize and integrate innovations across the two communities, bring the benefits of scale and platform proliferation to both communities. We clearly see the future of the database market being in open source."

NEXT: Solution Providers Debate The Merits Of The Deal