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cannot ignore the fact that the Indian database market is growing by around 30%, annually.

Worldwide, Sun believes that “the acquisition accelerates Sun’s position in enterprise IT to now include the $15-billion database market”. But there is uncertainty over the likely progress Sun can make in India.

“Corporates are probably not interested because the open source vendors did not pay much attention to the application requirements of the Indian market segments like SMB and egovernance. In contrast, the Oracles of the world have invested heavily in research to match the industry needs,” reasons out Subir Roy, state informatics officer in West Bengal.

Gartner’s principal analyst for software markets, Bhavish Sood, believes that Sun’s acquisition can catapult it into the role of player with a substantial interest in the database management market. “The MySQL purchase immediately casts Sun in the role of a major open source database management system vendor with heterogeneous operating system solutions. IBM, Oracle and Red Hat will likely feel some market pressure.”

Sood argues that Microsoft has hardware relationships with Sun and the fact is MySQL’s largest user base resides on Linux, with the next largest user base residing on Windows. All these will enable Sun to attract more Linux and Windows users as Sun customers. Also, Sun will be able to position itself more heterogeneously and shift its focus from primarily supporting Solaris-based (SAMP) systems to offering more inclusive support for Sun’s open source, Linux-based LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Pearl) system, according to Sood.

But ultimately, Sun’s success will depend on a couple of factors. First, Sun will be tested on the kind of support it can offer to MySQL within the Indian geography. Secondly, how willing are customers to buy software especially a DBMS product and how effectively it is able to convince CIOs to migrate from their current infrastructure.

So as Sun starts integrating MySQL, the Indian market may not be the same again for established global vendors of proprietary database like Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. For Oracle, Microsoft and SAP, the principal area of concern will be the mid range market segment, where stakes are becoming bigger. Recently, SAP announced its SME offerings with Intel box on SuSE Linux platform. The aim is to make the business software package less expensive and easy to implement with lower consultancy fee and cost of ownership.