MySQL innovating toward an IPO, BusinessWeek says
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It couldn't happen to a better set of people. As 'BusinessWeek' reports, MySQL is well on its way to an IPO. The interesting thing is what it's doing to get there. From CNET's Blogs network.
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It's not every day that the entire technical press goes bonkers over news in the open source world, but that's what happened last week, when Sun announced that it was buying MySQL.  Doubtless, the pleasant roundness of the sum involved - $1 billion â helped, as did the fact that most of that was cash.  But leaving aside the sense of satisfaction that events in the free software world should be suddenly thrust centre-stage, Sun's move does raise a larger question about the fate of all open source start-ups. read more
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After rocky road to public offering, search engine proceeds--but what will it do with its windfall?
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It looks like Google's public stock offering will proceed, no matter how hard the company tries to shoot itself in the foot. Not only that, its unique approach to the IPO game could result in an overhaul of federal securities regulations. -washingtonpost.com
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(InfoWorld) - Though business demand for IT products remains moderate, IPOs point to a healthy sector that is instilling confidence among investors. But IT is not back to the days of the bubble. Gone are the days when companies issue IPOs on promises alone. "You need real products and services, tangible results," said Eric Gebaide, managing director of Innovation Advisors, an investment banking firm. Companies generally need about $50 million in revenue before going public, he said. The IPO market is better now than it has been for years, and IT has nabbed a good share of investor funds, according to an IPO survey issued this week by Thomson Financial and the National Venture Capital Association. In May, there were 11 IPOs in the U.S., more than for any month since October 2004. For the first five months of the year, the number of IPOs, and their dollar amount, hit their highest level since 2000, right before the dot-com bubble burst. Of the 33 IPOs so far this year, and the $5.1 billion they raised, IT's share lagged behind medical, health, and life sciences. But the biggest IPO was for a wireless communications company, MetroPCS Communications, with an offering that raised an initial $1.15 billion. Also, average performance for IPO companies so far this year is strongest in IT, where companies have realized a 13.9 percent increase from offer price to close, according to IPO survey. Medical, health, and life sciences IPO companies realized a 2.2 percent increase, and non-high tech sectors registered a 6.6 percent increase. Valuations are also up in general, to $156.7 million per IPO for the year so far, an all-time record. "Revenue growth and profitability are driving valuations up," said Gebaide. For IT, investors have seen eight to 10 quarters of solid revenue, he noted. Companies are more confident about financial forecasts, which also boosts confidence in tech, he said. An example this week was Texas Instruments's midquarter forecast Tuesday. It said second-quarter earnings would be $0.40 to $0.44 a share, compared with its prior estimate of $0.39 cents to $0.45 cents a share. Though the upper end of the forecast was pulled down, the midpoint of the forecast still aligns to the $0.42 per share predicted by analysts polled by Thomson Financial. The TI shares slipped on the news, but the major brokerages, which forecast good profit margins and strong product cycles for the company, reiterated their positive ratings on the company. All of this is happening in a market where corporate IT spending remains moderate. A recentÂ ChangeWave Research poll, for example, reported that the percentage of companies planning to increase their spending on technology has fallen to its lowest point in the last four years. But demand among consumers and interest in certain technologies is strong. For example, IDC this week raised its 2007 PC industry forecast. Vendors will ship 256.7 million units in 2007, a 12.2 percent increase from the previous year, it said. IDC had previously forecast a growth rate of 11.1 percent. Consumers were attracted by low prices on notebooks, Microsoft's Vista, and the new generation of dual-core chips, IDC said. For their part, venture capitalists are generally interested in Web 2.0, e-commerce, mobile communications and security technology, Innovation Advisors' Gebaide said.ADVERTISEMENTIBM Information On Demand 2006Industrial Industry Leaders, please join us at IBM's premier information management global event, IBM Information On Demand 2006, October 15-20, Anaheim, CA. More IBM business and technical solutions content in one place than ever before! Select from  over 800 sessions. Register today!
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MySQL AB has made version 4.1 of its database software available to the public after months of testing customer production deployments.
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Open-source database vendor MySQL will sell JasperSoft's business intelligence tools to OEMs.
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MySQL at the end of January is expected to release a beta version of its MySQL 5.0 open source database, which is to feature enterprise-level functionality such as stored procedures and triggers, according to a company representative.
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It's not every day that the entire technical press goes bonkers over news in the open source world, but that's what happened last week, when Sun announced that it was buying MySQL.  Doubtless, the pleasant roundness of the sum involved - $1 billion ??? helped, as did the fact that most of that was cash.  But leaving aside the sense of satisfaction that events in the free software world should be suddenly thrust centre-stage, Sun's move does raise a larger question about the fate of all open source start-ups. read more
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Open-source advocates and industry watchers saw benefits to Sun's acquisition of MySQL that could mean greater use of open-source software in enterprise IT and more financial security to MySQL.
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Analysis: Sun broadens its open source stake, while MySQL enjoys Sun's standing and budget.
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The giant private equity firm, founded by Stephen Schwarzman and Peter Peterson, is expected to go public in the next few weeks.
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Investor's Business Daily - When Matrix Partners gave &#36;10 million to open-source software maker JBoss Group last February, some wondered whether the venture capital investors had lost their minds.
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(InfoWorld) - EBay has big plans to provide more programming tools like new SDKs and APIs to its community of about 45,000 third-party developers. The goal is to help external developers increase the volume and variety of applications they create for the company's marketplace and in particular to increase applications for eBay buyers. Max Mancini, the recently appointed senior director of platform and innovation at eBay, spoke to IDG News Service about these developer plans and about another group he heads called the Disruptive Innovation team, started last year. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview. IDG News Service: What does the Disruptive Innovation team do at eBay? Max Mancini: If we look at the evolution of innovation on eBay, it started with innovating around consumer-to-consumer commerce and the auction format online. Then over the last 5 or 6 years, eBay has had to innovate around technology just to keep up from scale and growth perspectives. So it has been focused on scalability, performance, and also search. In that sense, many of our investments and efforts around innovation have been focused on building up the platform. Now, as the company has gotten up to about 12,000 employees, what we need to do is make sure that we continue to innovate around new business and feature ideas. We have teams for each of the major eBay areas like our Buyer team, Seller team, and eBay Express team. Each team works on its own innovations, which are focused on keeping up with the customer demands and, as the market evolves, on what comes next. That's part of their normal product road maps. But my team is looking 12 to 18 months out to identify trends that we think are relevant to our business. We're creating a more structured innovation program so that when people come up with ideas, they can submit them to a database and an environment that we review on a regular basis, usually weekly or bi-weekly. And if things are pretty interesting, we're able to bring people into a rotation on an innovation team to work on their ideas. My Disruptive Innovation team is part of this. IDGNS: You head both the Disruptive Innovation team and the Developers Program. Why? Mancini: We feel that, organizationally, it made sense to combine the Developers Program and the Disruptive Innovation team because the Developers Program and Web services are things that enable us to innovate on top of eBay's marketplace platform. IDGNS: Are there any specific projects currently ongoing at the Disruptive Innovation team? Mancini: Yes. As part of our 2007 strategic planning for the company, the innovation team identified what we felt were the two most important areas for us to invest our time in: buyer experience and social commerce. Overall buyer experience is very important to us as a business, but independent of that, it's one of those areas we need to invest in because from a technology trend perspective, there's a fundamental shift in the way people expect to interact on the Internet, and we need to get ahead of that. Internet users are evolving past just going through page flows, in other words, clicking on five links to get something done: filling out a form here and going to the next page and so on. They're going to more of a rich media, interactive experience that we have traditionally seen on desktop applications but that can be delivered to the Web. Think AJAX and Flash. So we're spending a fair amount of time investing in buyer experience, specifically around rich media experiences delivered via the Web. Regarding social commerce, it's not social networking. If you look at things like LinkedIn, Plaxo, your Skype client, your AOL client, your Yahoo address book, your e-mail, all of these things define relationships you have. But no one is looking at how these relationship definitions affect trust relationships in commerce. Let's say you have tickets for sale for a local sporting event but don't want to go through the hassle of listing them. You know you have friends who might be interested in the tickets but you don't want to spam all your friends. Making those tickets available to your buddies in your IM buddy list or your address book, and letting them discover what's available out there is an interesting model. The other piece is if you're going to transact with somebody and you don't have a relationship with that person. The fact that people are comfortable sharing and defining their relationships online makes that a potential disruptor to a reputation system [like eBay's feedback system]. So it's very important from my perspective to explore and understand how these trust definitions can affect an online reputation system. IDGNS: Would this be taking eBay's feedback system to the next level? Mancini: Yes, absolutely, but it's a different angle on it. Our feedback system is based on transactions, as opposed to determining whether I can trust this person through some other relationship other than a transaction. We need to stay on top of this trend. IDGNS: A developer told me he's happy with the eBay Developers Program but that sometimes when you make changes to APIs, it forces him to adjust things on his application. Is this issue something you keep in mind when tweaking APIs? Mancini: Change management is very important to developers because they have to react and update their applications. So one of the first things I did at the Developers Program was staff up our product managers so that things don't slip by. This has happened in the past because we've had very limited product management support on APIs, and that's changing now. I've got a good team focused on that. Our general direction is that anytime we release a feature on the site, that feature should be API/Web services-enabled because our [external] developers can innovate more than we can because there are 45,000 of them and 12,000 eBay employees. So there are definitely great advantages to having a robust developer program, and we want to make sure those developers aren't getting left behind. Developers also want us to help them market their products to buyers and sellers. They invest money, time, and effort to create applications that work on top of eBay and they want some help reaching eBay users, so we're bringing aboard a full-time person to focus on nothing but helping our third-party developers market their tools to eBay users. Â
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Cable television upstart Current Media Inc. plans to go public later this year, giving investors a chance to assess the entrepreneurial skills of its co-founder, Al Gore.
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The code, which was open-sourced in April, will be used for the administration tool that connects to the MySQL database.
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With Sun Microsystems' $1 billion acquisition of open source database vendor MySQL announced Wednesday, Sun gets ownership of a major player in the open source software industry while MySQL gets the backing of a multibillion-dollar, established systems company.Called the largest open source software deal ever, the merger makes Sun the owner of a critical part of the popular LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/Python/PHP) open source software stack. Sun already has been offering up its own software to open source, even basing its development tools strategy on the open source NetBeans platform."MySQL is an important part of the LAMP stack, [and] has grown to be enterprise-ready technology used by large organizations, and Sun is now a major player in the LAMP stack," said Raven Zachary, analyst with The 451 Group. MySQL customers get the benefit of a larger support organization, Zachary said.Sun, meanwhile, will push MySQL as enterprise-ready technology and as an alternative to proprietary databases like Oracle, he said. "I think Sun has really been struggling in building a software revenue stream around its open source projects, and I think for them to take on MySQL, now they have a very successful revenue stream around an open source software [stack] that was lacking before," said Zachary.The deal was applauded by open source CRM vendor SugarCRM, PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) tools vendor Zend Technologies, and SpringSource, makers of the open source Spring Framework for Java development."I think it's an incredibly smart move by Sun and Jonathan Schwartz," said SugarCRM CEO John Roberts. While Roberts said he had been looking forward to an IPO by MySQL, the deal nonetheless makes sense. Sun, Roberts said, gets a mission-critical database that is "probably the most widely used database on the planet today."Zend and SpringSource had similar impressions."I think open source has gone mainstream," and Sun has put its stamp on it, said Zend CEO Harold Goldberg. "We think it's a great day for open source, and we think it's a great day for the LAMP stack.""The acquisition of MySQL by Sun marks one of the most significant recognitions of the importance and power of open source as a disruptive force in technology," said SpringSource CEO Rod Johnson in his blog.Sun heralded the deal as its entrance into the database market and will offer global support offerings for MySQL. "We're announcing we're entering the $15 billion database business," said Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz on a conference call with MySQL and Sun executives.By Sun's acquisition, MySQL overcomes its biggest impediment: Ensuring peace of mind to a global company that wants to put MySQL into a mission-critical deployment, Schwartz said. "It?s very clear to us that that is what our customers have come to expect from Sun," he said. "We believe there are synergies in putting the two companies together that will allow MySQL to grow more rapidly and allow Sun to grow more rapidly."New customers for both MySQL and Sun MySQL has been extending into mission-critical, high performance environments in the last couple of years, said Marten Mickos, who has been MySQL CEO and will become a senior vice president at Sun. "With this acquisition by Sun, we'll be able to offer those customers even better service, a full stack and at the same time heterogeneous solutions running on a number of platforms with a number of environments," Mickos said. "It strengthens our ability to serve our existing customers and very importantly serve the new customers coming over as enterprises move over to Web-based architectures in their enterprise infrastructure."The acquisition complements Sun technology, said Ian Murdock, chief OS strategist at Sun in a separate interview. "If you think about the two companies together in terms of technology offerings and technology basis, it's very complementary," he said. Sun is in the enterprise and has a substantial Web presence, while MySQL has a substantial Web presence and is entering the enterprise, Murdock said.The MySQL database runs on several platforms, including Linux and Sun's Solaris. MySQL does not see the database market, though, as saturated. "One of the things that's always been exciting about MySQL is we're really going after a new market of database users," with success in the Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 and SaaS (software as a service) spaces, said Zack Urlocker, MySQL executive vice president of products. Sun and MySQL also have joint customers such as eBay, he said."I think putting the two companies together, both in terms of what Sun can do to accelerate MySQL adoption and what MySQL can do to accelerate Sun's position in the Web space is going to be very interesting to watch," Murdock said. "This allows us to reach into new markets and have conversations with enormous numbers of developers and startups and other companies that are using MySQL in droves," he said, also pointing out that Sun could sell its workstations and servers to these users.Although Sun has been involved in the development of the rival open source database, PostgreSQL, Schwartz said Sun was reaffirming its commitment to PostgreSQL. "We are firmly committed to figuring out the ways we can optimize and integrate innovations across the two communities. Between MySQL and PostgreSQL, we probably have a large portion of the market covered," said Schwartz.Sun's Josh Berkus is the lead on the PostgreSQL project. Berkus said Sun would continue to accommodate multiple databases.The idea of Sun buying MySQL was born out of a dinner between Schwartz and Mickos a few months ago, Urlocker said. Although MySQL had been on a track to deliver an IPO, the chance to become part of Sun "became just too exciting for us," he said. "This enables us to accelerate our growth onto a much larger kind of platform in the industry."MySQL will become part of Sun as part of the deal, which is expected to be completed in about two months. MySQL products likely will continue to be offered via the same open source subscription strategy.