The VAR Guy

Oracle OpenWorld — a major event for Oracle partners and customers — kicks off October 11 in San Francisco. Sun Microsystems will be in the house. So will Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. And if you look hard enough, there will even be some MySQL content at the event. Here’s the scoop.

As Oracle prepares to consume Sun Microsystems  (and the open source MySQL database), The VAR Guy wonders: What does the future hold for MySQL’s channel partner strategy? Hmmm. An August 2009 Sun partner conference, called Avnet Compass, could provide some chatter on the topic.

Call them strange — but smart — bedfellows in Microsoft’s cloud. As part of the Microsoft Windows Azure initiative, Microsoft says the Azure cloud will support MySQL, the open source database. Frankly, The VAR Guy thinks it’s a brilliant move. Here’s why.

This blog entry is an annual ritual for The VAR Guy: As the National Retail Federation Convention 2009 starts in New York, many open source companies (Novell, Red Hat, Sun MySQL, Openbravo) appear to be absent. That’s a massive mistake for open source companies and their channel partners. Here’s why.