I've been doing some sales calls to prospects and customers in the midwest the last week or so. I like to do this periodically to make sure I'm not just drinking the open source koolaid, but really hearing from customers, prospects and the sales reps in the field. One advantage of MySQL being a part of Sun is we are now able to get appointments with CIOs and CTOs of Fortune 500 companies more readily than before I’ve been doing some sales calls to prospects and customers in the midwest the last week or so. I like to do this periodically to make sure I’m not just drinking the open source koolaid, but really hearing from customers, prospects and the sales reps in the field. One advantage of MySQL being a part of Sun is we are now able to get appointments with CIOs and CTOs of Fortune 500 companies more readily than before. These are large accounts that have significant scale and expertise in IT, but are usually more conservative than most of the west coast Web 2.0 companies where MySQL has made its mark.And they are all interested in open source. I visited a few multi-billion dollar Fortune 100 companies and the message from them was clear: “it’s not business as usual.” One CTO told me that their old model of working with expensive Enterprise systems from IBM and Oracle just wasn’t compatible with their business model. The software scaled technically, but it didn’t scale economically. And the software was getting too complex for their operations, requiring more and more staff to keep it all running. Like most companies, they’re under pressure to reduce their IT spend and ramp up new web-based projects to reach out to customers, partners and suppliers. So they’re turning to open source like nobody’s business. It’s not just a grassroots movement; it’s both bottoms up and top down. These companies have been successful with pilot projects, they’re getting people trained and they’re getting good results with an economic payoff. The CTO’s I’ve met are hands-on, trying out MySQL and other open source technology and putting it through its paces. Once CTO told me that MySQL is now their standard for all new application development. If there’s a reason they can’t use MySQL –if it doesn’t have some feature they need, they will run a closed source database –but its the exception. That’s very different from a few years ago, when MySQL was the exception. To me this is a significant shift in thinking that’s taken place in the last year. Maybe it’s because of the fear of recession or maybe its because of the best practices being observed in leading web companies. But I think this is really the best sign of “Enterprise 2.0” that I’ve seen. Just as Gartner and others have predicted, open source is going mainstream. Open Source