Not many moons ago, a senior SAP executive based in India said after a press conference in Bangalore, ?You know, we are open to the idea of having open source databases with our ERP solutions, but Indian corporates are not interested.? Other vendors narrate similar stories, confirming that most companies use proprietary databases like Microsoft?s SQL Server or Oracle to run their databases.
In sharp contrast, Sun has acquired popular open source database MySQL for $1 billion and its chief executive officer, Jonathan Schwartz terms the MySQL deal as the ?most important acquisition in the history of the company?. The database firm will have ?a central role? as Sun rolls out its open source strategy, he confirmed in a recent conference call.
But, in India like elsewhere, not many perhaps believe that Sun will have an easy road ahead here against the might of Microsoft and Oracle. As one blogger in Pythian.com commented: ?Will MySQL defeat the Oracle Database?? question sounds to me like ?Will OpenOffice.Org defeat Microsoft Office??
MySQL has several customers like Yahoo! Google, Nokia, YouTube and Facebook. However, in India, it has a negligible presence. Though Schwartz?who spent $1 billion to acquire MySQL?is yet to roll out Sun?s India plans for the database, there is euphoria among senior executives who run Sun?s business in India. ?While the open source database market is an established one, it is a new area for Sun and an opportunity for growth. The acquisition of MySQL adds an important piece of the application stack to Sun?s software portfolio and reaffirms Sun?s position as leading provider of platforms for the web economy,? says KP Unnikrishnan, director of marketing, alliances and teleweb sales, Sun Microsystems in India.
Gartner?s figures for annual sales of database software suggest that in 2005 and 2006, open source databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL had a marketshare of less than 1%. Out of $105-million business estimated in India during 2006, according to Gartner, the open source vendors had a 0.2% marketshare against Microsoft SQL?s share of 41.5%, Oracle?s 28.4% and IBM DB2?s of 17.6%. Gartner says it has not yet finalised data for 2007.
Another study, by Frost & Sullivan, based on an analysis of 300 enterprises across India, indicates that the Indian database market in 2006 was $148.6million (which is higher than the Gartner figure) and is expected to reach $424 million by 2010. Whatever be the numbers in terms of size, Sun 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.
The small and medium businesses (SMB) market has shown some positive growth compared with large industry segments. Oracle also did not want to comment on Sun?s acquisition of MySQL and its possible impact on the open source database market in India. But many analysts and industry people believe that, with MySQL, Sun can power its way into the SMB space more effectively than it has done in the past, thereby creating problems for the global majors.
Roy says that, for the SMBs as well as the government, database is one of the most important components in the business software package.
?As more web-based applications dominate the SMB business, open source is becoming an attractive option,? he says. Roy believes that Sun?s platform initiative LAMP can now become an alternative to the SMB solutions of SAP, Oracle and Microsoft.
According to Radhesh Balakrishnan, who heads platform strategy at Microsoft India, it is important to look at the issue of cost and openness from the perspective of total cost of ownership (TCO) and not just license and maintenance fees.
?We believe that TCO is an acid metric that enable customers to make informed IT investment decisions and goes beyond the initial purchase cost of a hardware or software to include pre implementation soft costs and post-implementation operation, support, maintenance, downtime and training costs,? says Balakrishnan.
Microsoft says its SQL Server is a complete solution?no need for add-on elements that may add to the total costs, reduced training costs given the overall familiarity that Microsoft platform provides and the strong support in a large partner community.
The idea is to address the needs of SMBs that are different from those of enterprise class customers. ?So SQL server provides SMB segments with a range of tailored options that they can choose from, including SQL Express, available as free download, to multiple licensing options that help SOHO and SMB customers manage their costs in different ways.?
For SAP, there is also a positive opportunity waiting if MySQL succeeds in India. It can try to push its MaxDB database to SAP customers as an alternative to MySQL as a free download.
A SAP community network blog says, ?MaxDB is the one-stop-shop choice as database for SAP solutions and available for almost all SAP solutions. SAP customers get MaxDB together with SAP Solutions or SAP Technology as part of the SAP distribution media or the SAP service marketplace respectively.? Pradipto Bhowmick, associate director in PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), does not agree with the view that MySQL can win against other proprietary databases easily.
?Proprietary databases will continue to have their buyers. There is potential for more opportunities in the market with a comprehensive open source strategy. However, the choice of technology will continue to be driven by the applicability and the business context for which the database proposition is being chosen,? says Bhowmick. This is because there are differences in the offerings of MySQL and other proprietary databases. ?Typically they would address different business contexts and hence in their respective applications they would individually provide more value for money,? he sums up.