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Posted by Leslie Poston on March 29th, 2008
Up until now IBM has been seen as weak in the online marketplace. This is in spite of investments in companies like Linux, Apache and Eclipse. With its financial backing of EnterpriseDB open source it has declared its intent to finally create a more substantial online presence, and will go head to head with Sun Microsystems, already a heavy hitter in the open source DB market.
EnterpriseDB are the makers of GridSQL. Now that they have decided to open source GridSQL it will be directly competing with Sun's open source product MySQL. MySQL has been the open source engine of choice for data base infrastructure for a long time, so it will be interesting to see if a company can really hold its own against it.
IBM's investment was part of a third round of investments totaling ten million dollars. Other investors in this third round of investment are Charles River Ventures, Fidelity and Valhalla Partners. SQL data base applications are key elements of many web based applications, including the ever popular Word Press and Vbulletin, among others.
MySQL has been successful by offering a limited, basic version for free to developers and charging under $600 for any commercial use, which is quite reasonable. You'd think that a new entry into the market would remain competitive in pricing against the popular MySQL, but EnterpriseDB is taking a different tack. It plans to charge nearly $1000 for its basic version, reasoning that it offers several features similar to the popular Oracle application, and that Oracle is more expensive still.
It isn't clear whether the strategy of competing directly with MySQL and indirectly with Oracle will work for EnterpriseDB. The dual approach could give it an edge over any new entries into the market, and possibly over Oracle. I'm guessing that MySQL's market share will be harder to shake. Regardless, this is IBM's first major investment into a start up, so I'm sure industry pundits will be following developments closely.
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| Cyndy Aleo-Carreira | March 30th, 2008 at 1:39 am |
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Leslie, I don’t even know where to begin with this one. GridSQL is not a competitor for MySQL Community, which is the free, open-source edition. It’s an enterprise-level database built on an actual competitor for MySQL: PostgresSQL. GridSQL as an enterprise product is certainly not priced out of the range that MySQL Enterprise is in, and I’m not sure where you got the $600 maximum number from, which is the pricing for MySQL Enterprise Basic, and that’s a per-server/per-year cost with very limited features for the enterprise level. The pricing for MySQL Enterprise goes as high as $5000 USD per server per year depending on the feature set required. EnterpriseDB’s other offering, PostgresSQL Plus Advanced Server, in which GridSQL is included, comes with a $5995/socket price, so again, still in the same range, and more affordable than Oracle. I’m also not sure where the comparison with Sun is actually coming into play. IBM didn’t jump into open-source or actually buy anything here; they participated in EnterpriseDB’s funding round, and EnterpriseDB is in the business of selling enterprise solutions. Combining the two separate announcements into one is confusing, at best, on the part of EnterpriseDB. Sun loves to buy the whole project (like MySQL), usually seeming to tank it along the way. | |
| Derek M. Rodner | April 1st, 2008 at 2:34 pm |
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Leslie, I’m the Director of Strategic Marketing at EnterpriseDB. Thanks for your interest– I think our recent announcement that IBM has invested in our company is indeed exciting news. If you will permit me, I wanted to provide a few clarifications to your post. Postgres Plus and Postgres Plus Advanced Server are EnterpriseDB’s principal product offerings. Each of these is a direct competitor to Sun’s MySQL. These products are both based on PostgreSQL, which is widely considered to be the world’s most advanced open source database. GridSQL, which, as you reported, is now available under an open source license, is included in both of our products. GridSQL is a business intelligence and data warehousing solution that enables database performance to scale nearly linearly as additional servers are added to a grid of servers. GridSQL is an important part of our product offering, but it is the Postgres Plus product family that competes directly with MySQL. We also, as you mention, compete with Oracle, particularly with our Postgres Plus Advanced Server product. This product is unique among open source-based databases in its ability to run, unchanged, applications written for Oracle. Our offering is compelling because Postgres Plus Advanced Server costs only a small fraction of the cost of Oracle. If you would like to learn more about EnterpriseDB, I would be pleased to talk with you. Best regards, | |
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