When Oracle announced plans to acquire Sun Microsystems (and by association, MySQL), some folks reacted with concern. Others reacted with delight. But one start-up company — named Continuent — certainly deserved to celebrate. Here’s why.
Continuent is a member of The VAR Guy’s Open Source 50, which tracks the world’s most promising open source channel partner programs.
Continuent develops commercial open source solutions for continuous data availability … Yada, yada, yada … the company’s software integrates Oracle and MySQL databases. Assuming Oracle completes the Sun acquisition, Oracle will also acquire Sun’s MySQL database business.
Hitting the Jackpot?
Talk about being at the right place at the right time. Continuent could be sitting in the middle of the perfect storm. Regardless of which direction Oracle goes with MySQL, Continuent should be able to help partners and customers connect the dots between Oracle and MySQL systems.
Just this week, Continuent began public beta testing of the company’s Continuent Tungsten Enterprise for Oracle. According to a prepared statement from Continuent CEO Eero Teerikorpi:
“Continuent Tungsten opens up an opportunity to extend the existing Oracle implementations with low-cost MySQL databases by providing real-time Oracle-to-MySQL replications services.”
Um, Oracle may not like the fact that Continuent allows Oracle customers to leverage far lower cost MySQL implementations. But Oracle better get used to being cannibalized by its own open source database business — with our without Continuent’s help.
Oh, and a side note from The VAR Guy: Continuent also supports PostgreSQL and EnterpriseDB. So no matter how the open source database market shakes out, it looks like Continuent has covered its bases.
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