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 Today's explosive network growth is fueled by a massive increase in new people, applications, businesses, and services around the globe coming online daily. Worldwide Internet use has grown 265 percent since the year 2000 with millions joining each week, yet approximately 75 percent of the world's population is still not connected. Sun is intently focused on developing the technologies and creating the standards that bridge the world's digital divide — which we believe represents an enormous opportunity for Sun, our customers, and our partners.
Enterprises and developers alike want fast, scalable, and open solutions backed by world-class communities and support. When meeting with our enterprise customers around the world, I consistently hear about the need to deal with the massive increase in data used to run their businesses.
On the other hand, emerging Web and ecommerce companies want easy access to popular free and open software platforms (one example being the LAMP application stack). They see great customization value in an open source (vs. proprietary) database that is capable of supporting high traffic, scalable Web sites.
With Sun's acquisition of MySQL, the possibilities are unlimited. Sun and MySQL — the “M” in LAMP — share long histories of steadfast commitment to the open source community. The fit between the two companies is good, very good. MySQL has been running a highly successful business, and we plan to keep it that way. As the leading provider for the network economy and largest commercial open source contributor, Sun is focused on every critical aspect of integration to ensure we continue to deliver customer value and tackle the network scale requirements of today's Web economy.
The combination of MySQL and Sun means that you can now get unlimited scalability with the database of choice for next-generation applications.
Network Scale for You
The combination of MySQL and Sun means that you can now get unlimited scalability with the database of choice for next-generation applications. Sun behind MySQL and its community will help ensure continued innovation and accelerate the world's most popular open source database towards the next level of scalability and performance by leveraging Sun's $14 billion in expertise, assets, technologies, and R&D. For Sun's CEO perspective on the topic, read Jonathan's blog.
I recently met with Sun customer Real Time Matrix, a Web-based startup and MySQL user, to discuss the benefits of MySQL. We talked about future plans for MySQL and what they would like to see from Sun. For a customer point of view, tune in here.
Many of the world's largest, fastest-growing organizations use MySQL to save time and money powering their high-volume Web sites, business-critical systems, and packaged software. For those willing to spend money to save time and reduce risk, Sun is offering global enterprise support and services for MySQL. With today's mission critical support offering, we're enabling enterprises worldwide to take advantage of Sun and community innovation with the market-leading open database for the network economy (on their choice of platform) to achieve unlimited scale.
Huge Opportunities with MySQL
The excitement and anticipation among our customers, partners, employees, as well as the media and analyst community, has been very apparent. The week after Sun announced its intent to acquire MySQL, I traveled to Stockholm for a series of business meetings. Along with the British Ambassador to Sweden, I had the pleasure of hosting a dinner with our top Northern European customers. The event was incredibly positive and the overarching sentiment was optimism, with MySQL taking front and center in many of my conversations during my visit. These customers are excited about our strategy, our portfolio, and our vision for the future.
Sun's vision, "The Network Is the Computer," is more true today than ever. With MySQL, we offer the definitive platform for the network economy. We have a huge opportunity in front of us, and I can assure you our focus will be on customers and opportunities to deliver greater value into the market by leveraging the offerings we have now and will have in the future.
For those of you (including customers, partners and, developers) interested in the future of MySQL, I invite you to attend the MySQL user conference April 14-17 in Santa Clara, CA. Detailed information is provided here.
Regards,
Don Grantham
Executive Vice President
Global Sales & Services
Sun Microsystems
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