What a year!

This is the time when bloggers and columnists look back on the year and try to add some kind of cohesion to what may otherwise seem to be a random collection of news stories, events, and observations. There were lots of exciting stories in 2008, but for me personally, there was nothing more dramatic than Sun’s $1 billion acquisition of MySQL. Admittedly, this was a deal that I was a part of. Last year during the holiday break, there was still a lot of work going on behind the scenes for an announcement at a planned all-company meeting in Orlando. I don’t think the pace slowed down down at all during the months that followed.

Sun’s embrace of open source was in place well before this deal happened. It was several years in the making as Jonathan Schwartz took the helm of the company and bet heavily on open source. Sun has open sourced key technologies, including SPARC, Solaris, Java, and others. It remains to be seen whether this strategy will be enough to transform Sun back to profitability, but it has made Sun more relevant in growth markets than it was previously. Adoption of Sun’s software infrastructure products appears to be gaining, and the potential to optimize Sun software and systems could yield significant performance gains for customers. It’s a good strategy. Now it’s mostly a question of how well Sun executes.

For MySQL, it has been a heckuva exciting year. We started the year as 400 employees and quickly found ourselves integrating with 30,000 new colleagues. The good news is that MySQL received additional resources to help in some key areas, notably Engineering management, QA, and performance optimization. The bad news is that Sun has been hit hard in a tough economic climate.

Over the last 10 months, MySQL became part of Sun and Sun became a part of MySQL in ways we had not really imagined. The “can do” startup culture that we had has started to make its way into other areas of Sun, just as Rich Green and Jonathan had hoped. The MySQL business model is making its way into other software groups, the focus on growth areas like Web 2.0 is very real.

Best of all, we shipped MySQL 5.1 despite some internal critics, and it has been well received by many users and customers. Personally, I think it’s our best release ever, and I’m proud of the engineers, product managers, consultants, writers, SEs, and community members who made this a reality. I’m also proud of new releases we made of MySQL Cluster, MySQL Workbench, MySQL Enterprise Monitor, Query Analyzer, and many new drivers. While the integration inside of Sun caused some distraction here and there, we shipped more new products this year than ever before. MySQL’s business has also been quite robust. We’ve seen continued growth both in terms of adoption of the community edition and growth in our revenues. Being part of Sun has given MySQL a significant boost in credibility for Sun’s largest customers, no doubt a sign that open source is becoming more and more part of the mainstream.

Going forward, I’ve taken on a new role inside of Sun to help apply the high-volume/low-touch marketing we developed at MySQL across a broader range of products at Sun. I’ll still be working closely with my colleagues at MySQL, but now also helping with many other products in software and systems. I’m reporting to Anil Gadre, previously the CMO and now running the Application Platform Software group that includes MySQL and Middleware.

No doubt 2009 will be just as exciting. Let me know what you think of Sun’s open source efforts.