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GigaOm Net:Work Conference - Dec 9

I only recently found out about GigaOm's upcoming Net:Work conference.  It's held December 9 at UCSF Mission Bay conference center.  While the name of the conference is a bit ambiguous, the actual area of focus is very clear: how will we collaborate in the 21st century?  

The impact of smartphones, tablet computing, social networks, Software-as-a-Service and Cloud computing is just starting.  As a result, I think there are tremendous opportunities for startup companies to disrupt existing markets with more modern, lightweight applications that foster collaboration inside the company as well as with partners, vendors, consultants and customers.  

Companies that can more effectively tap into talent within their organization and across traditional boundaries may end up having a significant competitive advantage.  Instead of the traditional top-down view of management edicts flowing from HQ to employees and field offices, you now have the potential to develop, test and refine ideas from any part of the company or community regardless of location.  

That was the approach we took at MySQL and it worked very well with employees distributed in more than 40 countries, 90% of whom worked from their homes.  We also had a huge community of users we could tap into that contributed tremendous value to the company.  Even though we had primitive tools for collaboration (IRC, Skype, Forums, Wikis, conference calls, mailing lists etc), we always operated with a global perspective. This enabled us to develop great talent regardless of location.  Managing a distributed organization is not easy, but you get some amazing benefits if you do it right.

Speakers at the conference include Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com), Dave Hersh (Jive), Maynard Webb (LiveOps), Tom Kelly (Moxie Software), Doug Solomon (IDEO), Zach Nelson (NetSuite), Aaron Levie (Box.net), Ross Mayfield (SocialText) and more.

Also, thanks to Skip Hilton of GigaOm, there's a 50% off registration coupon: HILTONNETWORK50

• GigaOm: Net:Work 2010, Schedule, Speakers, Registration
• GigaOm: Consumerization of IT

MySQL Sunday at Oracle Open World

  

Looks like Oracle is continuing to invest heavily in MySQL and the storage engine eco-system.  They've announced a full MySQL Sunday at the upcoming Oracle Open World Sunday September 19, in San Francisco.  Registration is only $75 which is a bargoon.  I expect this will be bigger than any MySQL conference held to date.  And there's also the JavaOne developer conference and the rest of the Oracle Open World show.

Ok, technically things actually start at noon, but knowing the MySQL crowd, I am sure there will be parties that go well past midnight.  Helan gar!

• Oracle Open World: MySQL Sunday

Piper Jaffray on the Cloud

Piper Jaffray has published a 300+ page study on the cloud computing industry based on a recent survey undertaken of 100 CIOs. Bottom line, cloud computing is expected to grow significantly over the next five years. 

    Survey respondents expect the mix of cloud computing to escalate strongly to 13.5% in five years. This equates to a five-year CAGR of 19.2%, or 23.9% when we also incorporate IDC’s forecast that total software budgets will grow 4.7% annually. In other words, software spending will grow gradually in the next five years, but the mix of spend allocated to cloud-based applications will likely surge rapidly. Another way to think about the data is that the Cloud Computing market is expected to grow five times as fast as the broader software market: 23.9% vs. 4.7%.

If anything, I think the prediction is conservative and the impact could be much larger in magnitude when mainstream adoption occurs.  But the risk is that adoption takes longer, just as it did for open source software.  And as the report indicates, open source is powering much of the cloud computing that's going on:

    The next-generation Cloud Computing data centers are NOT running Microsoft Windows; they are increasingly leveraging the compelling economics of open source components. For example, the data centers powering Amazon, Google, and salesforce.com all run on Linux and other open source technologies. In fact, Red Hat’s operating system and the MySQL database are key components to many of the leading-edge Clouds being developed today. 

Why is this occurring? Because open source leverages a global community development process which results in a product that evolves rapidly, provides transparency into the source code dynamics, and surpasses other products in terms of security and reliability – all at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than traditional offerings.

• RedMonk: Who's Winning in the Cloud Marketing Battle? 
• Information Week: Piper Jaffray Sees Gold Rush in Cloud

Future of Open Source Survey 2010

As usual, Michael Skok of North Bridge ventures will be presenting the results of the annual Future of Open Source survey at this year's OSBC conference, March 17-18 in San Francisco.  This is a great opportunity to weigh in and provide your perspective on some important business questions. Here are the 2009 Results as reported by Ostatic.

• Survey: Future of Open Source survey, 2009 Results, 2009 Presentation
  
• OSBC Conference: Main site, Agenda, Advisory Board
• North Bridge Ventures: Main site, Team, Portfolio, News

Scott McNealy's Final Goodbye

 

I met Scott McNealy several times over the last year in customer meetings and to talk about Sun's open source strategy.  He's a class act all the way.  He sent out his final email to Sun employees and partners earlier today. 

Here's an excerpt:    

    While it was never the primary vision to be acquired by Oracle, it was always an interesting option. And this huge event is upon us now. Let’s all embrace it with all of the enthusiasm and class and talent that we have to offer.

    This combination has the potential to put Sun, its people, and its technology at the center of yet another industry and game changing inflection point. The opportunity is well documented and articulated by Larry and the Oracle folks. Not much I can add on this score. This is a very powerful merger. And way better than some of the alternatives we were facing...

    So, to be honest, this is not a note this founder wants to write. Sun in my mind should have been the great and surviving consolidator. But I love the market economy and capitalism more than I love my company. And I sure “hope” America regains its love affair with capitalism. And except for the auto industry, financial industry, health care, and some other places (I digress), the invisible hand is doing its thing quite efficiently. So I am more than willing to accept this outcome. And my hat is off to one of the greatest capitalists I have ever met, Larry Ellison. He will do well with the assets that Sun brings to Oracle...

    Oracle is getting a crown jewel of the technology industry. They will do great things with Sun. Do your best to support them and keep the Sun spirit alive and well in the industry. Our children will be better for it...

    My best to all of you, and remember: Kick butt and have fun!

You can read the entire letter over at CNet.

Thanks to Jim Starkey, the Father of Falcon

Jim Starkey joined MySQL about 2 1/2 years ago when MySQL acquired his startup company, Netfrastructure.  Jim has a long history in the database industry having created several major databases over the years and we wanted him to take the core engine of Netfrastructure and integrate it into MySQL.  This became the Falcon project, which is now in Beta as part of MySQL 6.0 and is targeted at web applications and designed to exploit modern multi-core multi-processor systems.  I expect we'll see more updates to Falcon in the coming months as part of the 6.0 release process.  The next release will be 6.0.5 (in the next week or so) which will include many Falcon bug fixes, performance improvements as well as new backup capabilities. 

Jim has always been a classic entrepreneur at heart.  He's been a great technologist and architect for Falcon but I think he prefers coding something new to dealing with meetings.  So, while it's a disappointment that Jim has decided to leave MySQL, it's not a complete surprise.  Over the past year two years, we've built an entire team around Falcon and Jim's been able to step back from some of the day to day grind and let others shine.  Ann Harrison, who was also part of Netfrastructure is continuing in her role and we've got quite a bit of home grown talent as well as new engineers from Sun helping out on Falcon.  I'm sure Jim will continue to be active in the MySQL community and provide his insight and guidance when we need it.  And maybe we can save some really hard bugs for Jim to fix.

If Jim's past is any predictor of his future efforts, I'm sure he'll have some exciting new technology coming out at some point.  It's been great to work with him and we wish Jim all the best in his new project.

In the meantime, I remain excited about Falcon as well as the many storage engines that keep popping up, ranging from our oldest and most mature storage engine InnoDB that keeps innovating, to the latest version of PBXT as well as specialized engines for data warehousing like Infobright and Kickfire. 

InfoWorld Digest

Since I've been doing most of my blogging lately over at InfoWorld, I thought I'd provide a short digest of some of the top posts in recent months. I share the blog with Savio Rodrigues from IBM, but other than some overlap at the occasional conference, we blog independently.  (Yes, it's an old photo.)  Enjoy!

• Matt Asay gets frustrated
• Summer tech conferences
• Why Fake Steve Jobs is worth reading
• Is Apple eating into Vista?
• JavaOne: Diversity and freedom
• 3G iPhone?
• When does a product become a platform?
• Patrick O'Keefe on managing online forums
• Open Source Goat Rodeo
• State of Open Source
• Why adoption matters

Typically I try to write 3-4 posts per week over at InfoWorld and then post things that are more MySQL-related here on this blog. But I admit, it's getting harder and harder to maintain two three different blogs.

Marten Mickos in SJ Merc

Marten Mickos was profiled in this past weekend's San Jose Mercury News, the prominent Silicon Valley newspaper.  (In fact, they have the domain name www.SiliconValley.com among others.)

Integrating with Sun's products is an attractive thing, but it's not the main idea. The main idea of the acquisition and of our business generally is to be the platform for the Web economy. Now, with the help of Sun, we will be able to accelerate this.

We had in our field organization 200 people; Sun has 17,000. We have a lot of usage in the big corporations, but we haven't been able to sell to them and become key vendors for them yet. With Sun, we get instant access to the big Fortune 500 and Fortune 2000 customers.

And to those who do want more than the database, we'll be able to say, "If you need the operating system, the middleware, the hardware, the development environment, you can get that from us, too."

The interview covers MySQL's growth, integration with Sun, corporate culture, open source business models and more.  Also, you can learn 5 things about Marten...

MySQL World Tour

We had a little champaign toast in our exec staff meeting when the news came across that Sun's acquisition of MySQL was complete.  Congratulations to all the MySQL and Sun employees who went the extra mile to make this happen in record time.  I especially appreciate the efforts that Sun's legal staff has gone to in order to accomodate the open source philosophy of MySQL.  While there are still a few details to work out, I am very pleased with all of our integration work.  It will be an exciting time and there's great opportunity for MySQL to continue to grow inside of Sun.  We also had a toast to Marten Mickos our CEO who is unfailingly humble and deserves everyone's thanks for building MySQL into such a successful company. 

Note that Sun is very clear that we will continue to support all major platforms and languages, so if you're using MySQL on Linux, Windows, Solaris or with Java, PHP, Perl, VB, C, Java or Ruby on Rails or any of our existing platforms and languages, you're in good hands.  No only that, we get additional technical resources from Sun to help out in key areas.  As Jonathan Schwartz, top dog at Sun said in his letter to the MySQL community:

"For our worldwide developers, Sun working with the MySQL community will more quickly take the MySQL database to the next level of scalability and performance by tapping into Sun's $14 billion in expertise, technologies and global support. Bottom line, Sun is putting a billion dollars behind the "M" in LAMP, increasing our already-strong commitment to open source communities, to deliver a more powerful Web application development platform. And we assure you, MySQL will remain just as open, fast, free, easy-to-use and innovative as you've always seen. And much more.

"Additionally, this arrangement does not change Sun's long-standing relationship with Oracle and Sybase in the marketplace. Just as Sun supports customer choice of platform through AMD, Intel and SPARC, customers will have a choice of database systems for use with Sun's platform offerings."

After our meeting it was back to business, we've started planning an upcoming world tour where we'll also toast all our users and customers around the world.  We'll be visiting lots of cities in the US and hosting a worldwide mashup tour. 

There will also be more announcements at the MySQL Conference & Expo April 14-17 in Santa Clara.  (BTW, you can use the Sun discount code mys08sun to save 10% off the registration fee.  I recommend registering soon before the tutorials sell out.)

• MySQL: letter from Marten Mickos, Rich Green, Conference
• Sun: Mashup tour, Jonathan's blog, letter from Jonathan

MySQL Conference Registration Open

The MySQL Conference & Expo web site for next year is now live.  Although the program is not completely finalized, we've got some of the basic information up and you can now register.  The preliminary schedule of sessions and tutorials have been posted.  In the coming weeks expect more info on keynotes, as well as the final list of sessions and exhibitors.

BTW, if you want to see some of the keynotes from last year's conference, they are available on www.blip.tv.

• MySQL Conference: Main site, Sessions, Tutorials, Speakers, Registration, Exhibitors