IBM Squares Off Against Sun

Up until now IBM has been seen as weak in the online marketplace. This is in spite of investments in companies like Linux, Apache and Eclipse. With its financial backing of EnterpriseDB open source it has declared its intent to finally create a more substantial online presence, and will go head to head with Sun Microsystems, already a heavy hitter in the open source DB market.

EnterpriseDB are the makers of GridSQL. Now that they have decided to open source GridSQL it will be directly competing with Sun's open source product MySQL. MySQL has been the open source engine of choice for data base infrastructure for a long time, so it will be interesting to see if a company can really hold its own against it.

IBM's investment was part of a third round of investments totaling ten million dollars. Other investors in this third round of investment are Charles River Ventures, Fidelity and Valhalla Partners. SQL data base applications are key elements of many web based applications, including the ever popular Word Press and Vbulletin, among others.

MySQL has been successful by offering a limited, basic version for free to developers and charging under $600 for any commercial use, which is quite reasonable. You'd think that a new entry into the market would remain competitive in pricing against the popular MySQL, but EnterpriseDB is taking a different tack. It plans to charge nearly $1000 for its basic version, reasoning that it offers several features similar to the popular Oracle application, and that Oracle is more expensive still.

It isn't clear whether the strategy of competing directly with MySQL and indirectly with Oracle will work for EnterpriseDB. The dual approach could give it an edge over any new entries into the market, and possibly over Oracle. I'm guessing that MySQL's market share will be harder to shake. Regardless, this is IBM's first major investment into a start up, so I'm sure industry pundits will be following developments closely.