When you look at the acquisition of MySQL by Sun, many pundits and  bloggers point to the acquisition as a way for Sun to fill the database slot in their offering. (PaulaRooney at ZDNet, Forbes)   But I think that leaves out a couple of key underlying market drivers — consolidation and competition — that may help to explain Sun’s acquisition, and to understand potential future implications for the industry as whole.

 Enterprise usage model drives need for consolidated open source support 

Enterprises use lots of different open source components – our internal research shows over 90 different components on average.  They typically combine many open source components into a single application, along with custom and proprietary software.  When these applications go into production and it’s time to get support, enterprises want to ensure they have support for all of the open source components in that application. 

Enterprises have two options for commercial support of open source software – getting individual support contracts on each component from different vendors or getting support on many or all of the software components from a single vendor.  Given all else being equal (quality, price), most enterprises would prefer the latter — a single vendor across many components.

Competition in open source support drives costs lower 

However, before we start to believe that this looks a lot like the proprietary world, we need to look at the second market driver — support for open source software is a competitive marketplace.  Unlike most proprietary software, open source creates the possibility of competition among vendors for support contracts.  We have seen this in the Linux market and at OpenLogic we offer support of over 350 open source components, often competing with other vendors.

Enterprises have realized that this is a competitive market and increasingly we find they are shopping for the best combination of support quality and price by getting competitive bids.  Price is a critical factor that enterprises consider.  In the past year, we have seen a growing number of enterprises dropping or foregoing support contracts from leading open source vendors such as JBoss and MySQL in order to find lower priced, consolidated support that will better meet their needs.  The winners in the open source market will be vendors that adapt to this model by creating business models, pricing and cost structures that adapt to this commoditization.

What it means for Sun and MySQL 

For Sun, the acquisition of MySQL is a starting point for addressing this need for consolidation of open source support.  However, it is not a sufficient ending point.  Enterprises will need support for more than the handful of open source components that Sun provides to-date.  In his blog, Jonathon Schwartz seems to acknowledge that — intimating in his blog that there is more open source in Sun's future.

What is less clear is how Sun will adapt to this change in the competitive environment.  In his blog, Jonathan Schwartz states that Sun is ready for the competitive environment that open source presents. 

The good news is Sun is already committed to the business model at the heart of MySQL's success – first investing to grow communities of users and developers, and only then creating commercial services that attract (rather than lock in) paying customers. 

However, competing with alternative products is very different from competing for support on the same product.  Success in open source will require that Sun can do both.