IT Week: Has MySQL grown in the same way as Linux in the enterprise, through stealth projects and pilots?

Zack Urlocker: We see both this bottom-up adoption from universities and, increasingly, top-down adoption from businesses who are saying, 'We need to save money, let's use open source.'

How has the business evolved?

MySQL started in 1995 but it was really only three years ago that we started to target businesses. Before that nobody was even cashing the cheques coming in; everyone was writing code. There was no venture capital. It started from when the founders were out there consulting. They needed a highly reliable, high-performance offering that was less complicated than the commercial databases. There was a 15-minute rule - the database had to be up and running inside 15 minutes.

For a small company by revenue, the customer list is remarkable here in the UK.

We have five million deployments in total, including Vodafone, BT and Lastminute.com, as well as global companies including Google, Yahoo and Lycos.

That said, most of these will be tactical projects that sit alongside bigger deployments based on better-known commercial projects. The sweet spot has always been web applications. Projects might start as tactical, such as a web-based customer service offering. Often, these are people who don't have budget to buy Oracle or DB2, but over time they become central. A few years ago, customer service over the web was nice to have but now it's your preferred way to interact. MySQL is definitely coming in through the back door, following in the footsteps of Linux and Apache.

In most cases we coexist with the big three databases and we never try to take business away from them. If you need a Ferrari database, choose Oracle or DB2 but if you need a Honda then choose MySQL as it doesn't require a team of five guys to keep it up and running.

With Computer Associates open-sourcing Ingres, how do you see the competition in open source databases?

MySQL is the most popular. Postgres is an interesting academic project. It's good that the open-source community can take responsibility for bugs but I don't think there will be a big community [for Ingres open-source development]. It's like open-sourcing VMS or the Amiga operating system. It's not a bad outcome compared to end-of-life for the product.

What are your plans for attracting business customers?

We're reaching a different kind of customer. The early-adopters were very risk-tolerant. Now people want to know we have a roadmap, 24-by-7 support, consulting, and escalation procedures. That's why we've been hiring a vice-president of software engineering and professional services.

Isn't MySQL often used as a bargaining chip during Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server licensing negotiations?

We joke that if you wear a MySQL T-shirt you get 30 percent off. But we think the old models of high prices for software and features you don't use have gone.

Are you comfortable with the GNU Public Licence (GPL) as the basis for a profitable business?

We operate with a dual-licensing GPL/commercial model. GPL is not perfect but like democracy it's the best there is out there, so I don't think we're going to go away from that. We work with the Free Software Foundation and in some ways we're their poster-child for GPL. [FSF founder] Richard Stallman is a revolutionary. GPL is a great licence but companies like SAS, Cisco, Adobe and NetIQ don't necessarily want to open-source their applications. Commercial customers like the idea that they can have a commercial relationship.

Are you pursuing grid-computing like IBM and Oracle?

Not grid per se, but in April we introduced clustering capabilities, acquired from Ericsson. The MySQL 5.0 beta is due in the third quarter with full availability in the first half of 2005. We'll have enterprise capabilities such as stored procedures.

What about adding business intelligence tools?

No, we aim at the 80 percent need. We do work with a lot of business intelligence companies such as Business Objects, Hyperion and SAS, and we don't ever want to compete with these guys. The core engine is extremely fast but we see ourselves as a database component supplier.

ABOUT ZACK URLOCKER AND MYSQL

Zack Urlocker is vice-president of marketing at MySQL, an open-source database developer.

Urlocker previously worked for companies including Borland and WebMethods.

MySQL made a profit on about €12m in revenues for the last year, having grown at 100 percent year on year.

Founded in Sweden, the firm employs about 150 people in 19 countries.