Topics for this podcast:
*Our latest CAOS Special Report – Control and Community
*Red Hat releases RHEL 6
*Symbian and Oracle highlight community challenges
*The latest on government adoption of OSS from GOSCON
*Open core issue continues, now with Linux and evil twins
iTunes or direct download (31:02, 8.5MB)
Chief Corporate Architect at Oracle, been at Oracle since 1986, technology and architecture decisions, responsible for all open source at Oracle. Company-wide initiatives on standards management and security — http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2010/public/schedule/detail/12440.
Where MySQL fits within Oracle’s structure.
Oracle’s Strategy: Complete. Open. Integrated. (compare with MySQL’s strategy: Fast, Reliable, Easy to Use).
Most of the $$ spent by companies is not on software, but on integration. So Oracle makes software based on open standards that integrates well.
Most of the components talk to each other through open standards, so that customers can use other products, and standardize on the technology, which makes it much more likely that customers will continue to use Oracle.
Oracle invested heavily in open source even before the acquisition. Linux (Oracle Unbreakable Linux = Oracle Enterprise Linux = OEL). Clustering, data integrity, storage validation, asynchronous I/O, virtualiation technology that has been accepted back into the Linux kernel. They have enhanced Xen, in order to make a good Oracle VM server for x86. With Sun, they now have VirtualBox. In the 3 years of OEL, they have over 4,500 companies.
Oracle never settles for being second best at any level of the stack.
“Complete” means we meet most customer requirements at every level.
That’s why Oracle matters to Oracle and Oracle customers.
MySQL is small, lightweight, easy to install and easy to manage. These are different from Oracle, so MySQL is the RIGHT choice for many applications, so by adding MySQL to Oracle’s database offerings, it makes the Oracle solution more complete.
Investing in MySQL means:
making MySQL a better MySQL. Keep MySQL the #1 db for web apps.
improve enginnering consulting and support
24×7, world-class oracle support
MySQL community edition: “If we stop investing in the community edition, MySQL will stop being ubiquitous”.
They want to focus even more effort on:
web
embedded
telecom
integration with other products in the LAMP stack
Windows — #1 download platform is Windows, but it’s not the #1 *deployment* platform.
They want to invest more money in allowing Oracle tools to work with MySQL too. For example, Oracle Enterprise Manager for monitoring, Oracle Secure Backup for backups, and Oracle Audit Vault for auditing. (Pythian already has a free Oracle Grid Control plugin to monitor MySQL).
Oracle will keep pluggable storage engine API, they are starting a Storage Engine Advisory Board to talk about their requirements and experiences and future plans and product direction.
MySQL 5.5 is beta, that’s the big news. InnoDB is the default storage engine there.
5.5 is much faster….including more than 10x improvement in recovery times. There’s a 200% read-only 200% performance gain. Read/Write performance gain is 364% faster than MySQL 5.1.40. These are for large # of concurrent connections, like 1024 connections.
Better object/connection management, database administration, data modelling in MySQL workbench.
MySQL Cluster 7.1, improved administration, higher performance, java connectors, carrier grade availability and performance. “Extreme availability”.
They’re also making support better — MySQL Enterprise — bettter.
MySQL Enterprise Backup – formerly InnoDB hot backup. This is now included in MySQL Enterprise, not a separately paid for feature.
(Demo of MySQL enterprise manager)
In conclusion:
MySQL is important to Oracle and our customers — it’s part of Oracle’s complete, open, integrated strategy. Oracle is making MySQL better TODAY. A “come to Oracle OpenWorld pitch (I’ve been, it certainly is a great conference.)
We reported recently on Red Hat’s revenue growth and deferred revenue. One of the things I have been looking at recently is the slowdown in Red Hat’s growth in recent years, and the opportunities that the company has to improve that growth.
For some perspective it is worth noting that while Red Hat’s revenue has been growing steadily:
The rate of growth has been in decline for some time:
We have also noted (451 Group clients only) that the company will in all likelihood have to invest in inorganic growth if it is to meet its ambitious targets (such as 50% of server operating system market share by 2015, and growing to $1bn in revenue over three years - from February 2008).
Unfortunately for Red Hat its opportunities for inorganic growth in its core Linux market are limited since its dominance of the enterprise Linux market means that very few vendors would help it gain serious Linux market share. While there are multiple opportunities for the company to expand into new markets one problem that the company has is that would-be acquisition targets (MySQL, Hyperic) keep getting snapped up by its rivals.
(This isn’t a post about inorganic growth opportunities, but given our suggestion that open source can serve as an on-ramp to the cloud I would suggest that Red Hat could do a lot worse than look at Eucalyptus Systems as a long-term growth opportunity).
Fortunately for Red Hat the two major acquisitions that it has made in recent years (JBoss and Qumranet) both provide the company with opportunities to drive organic growth. Indeed, looking at the company’s business it is interesting to note quite how many opportunities for organic growth are at its disposal:
* JBoss - Red Hat’s middleware business continues to grow faster than the Linux business, albeit still not as a reportable segment of the company’s revenue. The company noted that 30% of its largest deals involved a middleware is fiscal 2009, there is still a lot of opportunity for greater cross-selling. The acquisition of systems integration and consulting firm Amentra was designed to help it deliver better value to JBoss customers. That and the JBoss MASS migration tools should start to deliver.
* The channel - 61% of deals came from the channel in Q1, up from 56% Q4. Red Hat more than doubled channel partners to 4,500 in 2009. Advanced Partners - VARs/SIs - grew from about 100 to about 350 in 09. Additionally the company has noted that while its renewal rates for its biggest accounts are close to 100% (”I think the only one that didn’t in the last couple of years was Oracle itself”, noted Jim Whitehurst in June) renewal rates from channel deals tend to be lower. It has put a program in place to rectify that.
* Increased penetration into existing accounts - Red Hat had 40,000 new customers in FY09. As the Eclipse Foundation’s Donald Smith noted, that means the company has a low revenue per customer. However, it also suggests huge opportunity for increased penetration into existing customers.
* Up-selling to Advanced Platform - traditionally, 70% of Red Hat’s Linux users have been on what was Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES. However, 50% of renewals in FY09 upgraded to the higher price Advanced Platform, rather than going for the standard Enterprise Linux Server.
* Virtualization - One of the drivers for AP is that it includes the advanced virtualization capabilities. Interest in virtualization is not only generating demand for the higher-priced RHEL variant but also helps Red Hat to avoid spending freezes on new hardware by de-coupling RHEL adoption from new hardware spending.
* Free to fee - Matt Asay noted recently that “nonpaid usage of Red Hat’s software that may well pose a bigger risk” to Red Hat than its chief rival Novell. That is something that the company is aware of, and it has been auditing customers to ensure that the amount of RHEL systems they have running is suitable for their subscription level. The company also sees a significant opportunity in converting users of community Linux distributions - such as CentOS or Ubuntu - to RHEL subscribers, and in 4Q09 landed a multi-year, multi-million dollar free-to-paid deal.
Will those be enough to help the company achieve its ambitious goals? Possibly not, and we do believe that Red Hat needs to expand its addressable market, but it is clear that even without acquisitions Red Hat has multiple opportunities for growing revenue in the next couple of years.