Stories about: MySQL

With support for three of the major pillars of application development and deployment -- Oracle 11g, Microsoft SQL, and open source MySQL -- under its belt, Amazon.com appears to be anticipating a major move by the enterprise into the cloud.

"We have come into real contention [for mindshare] in the enterprise," said Tim O'Reilly, CEO at O'Reilly Media, in his keynote address at OSCON, last week's Open Source convention in the US. "So we should be patting ourselves on the back, right? I'm not so sure."

A good CRM package does you no good if employees aren't willing to use it. Case in point: IMA Financial Group, a medium-sized financial services company based in the US. IMA had installed a commercial customer relationship management system that "was flexible and configurable and attractive on the front end," says business processes manager Jennifer Hallam.

"The important thing is to plan a strategy, to set guidelines on where and when open source products are to be used. IT shops are scrambling to set open source policies, but almost no one has implemented one with any teeth"

This week's eWeek contains what should be a wake up call for every CIO regarding the pervasiveness and challenge that open source represents to their jobs and organizations. In the midst of an extensive interview with Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green, Schwartz cites this anecdote, which provides dramatic evidence of the role open source plays in today's IT landscape. Here is the anecdote in its entirety:

Technology pros looking to find new work or secure their current jobs should get schooled on wireless, Web 2.0 and virtualization while also boning up on business basics.

For an executive who had just had his company bought for a cool billion a few months ago and was on the eve of announcing a major update to his business' flagship database program, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, now Sun Microsystems' senior vice president for databases, didn't look comfortable. Mickos had come to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the University of Texas Super Computing Center to explain that MySQL was not about to abandon Linux. His audience, the movers and shakers of Linux business and development circles, were not overly impressed.

Where do you see open source heading in the next five years, especially with regard to development, community, and market opportunities?

Editor's Note: Jason Scott joined Innovation Ads, a full-service online advertising agency, as its first-ever CIO on September 7, 2007. Scott, 31, had never held the CIO role before. Most recently, he ran IT for Corporate Express Imaging, a $450 million division of office products supplier Corporate Express. Scott started out as an administrative assistant in the IT department at Corporate Express Imaging when he was 20 and still in college. Over 10 years, he climbed the corporate ladder at Corporate Express only to realize that he'd have to leave the company if wanted to become a CIO.

When I read the database report from Evans Data that I wrote about yesterday, I noticed that the open-source databases-MySQL and PostgreSQL-fared rather poorly, in comparison to the commercial products (notably Oracle and DB2). Hmm, I thought. Maybe it's a case of "you get what you pay for."

Software as a service (SaaS) has gone beyond the realm of rogue deployments, and CRM software, most notably Salesforce.com, has led the way through the enterprise front door