Hay CEOs autoproclamados (y no señalo a nadie). Hay CEOs que por si solos son capaces de hundir a una compañía. Y hay CEOs capaces de resucitarlas.
El caso más conocido por todos es Steve Jobs, que con su vuelta a Apple consiguió no solo sacarla de la produnda crisis en la que estaba, sino llevarla a donde está hoy en día, con unas tasas de crecimiento que ya le gustaría a cualquiera.
Algo parecido ocurre con Sun desde que Jonathan Schwartz se puso al frente. Convirtió un modelo de negocio basado en los productos, con el que Sun se encontraba estancada, a un modelo basado en los servicios. Potenció todavía más el apoyo que Sun prestaba desde hace años al software libre. Y las cifras le están avalando.
Al igual que otros muchos dentro de Sun, Schwartz tiene su propia bitácora. Fue a través de dicha bitácora, con su “Helping dolphins fly”, la manera con la que me enteré que Sun acababa de adquirir MySQL AB. Y solo tres días después en “In a vortex” daba respuesta a la gran mayoría de preguntas que esta adquisición había suscitado.
Aprovecho para citar un par de fragmentos de esta última entrada:
A billion dollars for a company that gives its products away for free?
Facebook gives its products away for free, too. They make money on ads, we make money on service, support and infrastructure. MySQL has a big business, growing very rapidly. Investing in the future has more value than buying the past - which is why the latter so often comes at a discount.
What happens to your commitment to PostgreSQL?
It grows. The day before we announced the acquisition, and within an hour of signing the deal, I put a call into Josh Berkus, who leads our work with Postgres inside of Sun. I wanted to be as clear as I could: this transaction increases our investment in open source, and in open source databases. And increases our commitment to Postgres - and the database industry broadly. The same goes for our work with Apache Derby, and our JavaDB.
Josh says it exactly right on his blog - Sun wants to be the leading provider of datacenters. Not just MySQL datacenters. Exactly.
Y también:
Are there cost synergies in the deal?
Nope.
Are there revenue synergies in the deal?
Everywhere we look.
Where are the revenue synergies?
The more interesting question is “where aren’t the synergies?” Wherever MySQL is deployed, whether the user is paying for software support or not, a server will be purchased, along with a storage device, networking infrastructure - and over time, support services on high value open platforms. Last I checked, we have products in almost all those categories.
In addition, the single biggest impediment to MySQL’s growth wasn’t the feature set of their technology - which is perfectly married to planetary scale in the on-line/web world. The biggest impediment was that some traditional enterprises wanted a Fortune 500 vendor (”someone in a Gartner magic quadrant”) to provide enterprise support. Good news, we can augment MySQL’s great service team with an extraordinary set of service professionals across the planet - and provide global mission critical support to the biggest businesses on earth.
Y todavía habrá gente que piense que en Sun están locos, “gastándose” 1.000 millones.
