InfoWorld: MySQL buys high-availability vendor Alzato: October 14, 2003: By Paul Krill: Platforms

Not you mothers Open Source Company!

InfoWorld: MySQL buys high-availability vendor Alzato.
MySQL plans to integrate high-availability clustering technology into its open source database through the acquisition of Alzato, announced on Tuesday.
Alzato, a venture company started by Ericsson in 2000, has developed and marketed NDB Cluster, a high-availability data management system designed for telecom/IP environments, according to MySQL. The technology will provide a high-availability clustering data management engine for systems that require maximum uptime and real-time performance, such as in telecom, network applications, and heavy-load Web sites, MySQL said. Alzato's technology will be offered in a version of the MySQL database planned for release in 2004 and tentatively called MySQL Cluster.

Alzato technology expands existing high-availability capabilities in the MySQL database and also provides for fast recovery, said Marten Mickos, CEO at MySQL.

"We can offer high-availability at a totally new scale," he said.

MySQL customers in areas such as network equipment manufacturing and telecom have growing demands for high-availability functionality, Mickos said.

The company would not reveal the cost of the Alzato acquisition, which actually closed a month ago.

A "open source" company acquiring another company? Egads, the world is spinning of it's axis!


Also, its interesting to note we now have 3 major brands in the open source world, which are growing their product line in various ways.

MySql is quickly become a brand name in the world of Relational Database Systems (RDBM's) competes against the likes of Oracle , IBM's DB2 and MS Sql Server. It's acquiring functional via Alzato and SapDB (SAP existing database product).

The JBoss brand competes in the world of web application servers verus BEA's Weblogic, IBM's WebSphere and (in part) MS's .Net platform (or at least the ASP past of it). They are acquiring functionary by bunding parts various Apache projects and hiring open source developers.

And the Red Hat Brand is in the Operating System game competing againts Microsoft family of Windows servers. As a publicly traded company it continues to bunding and intergrate the lastest in Linux kennerals and software.

These are not the only brands of the open source community, but are the major commercial open source ones. Apache, Mozzilla are non profit in nature. Netscape (based on Mozilla) was a major brand but it's owner AOL Time Warner are unwilling, (unable, un-thinking) to support it.

PostgreSQL can't seem to get any visibility outside of the bit head community

There are other flavours of Linux (and more popular ones in Europe or Asia ), plus BDS Flavours (like: Free BSD, Open BSD and NetBsd).

Open Office has potential as a brand but they competing (again) against MS Office which has a 150 % lock on the market.

Right now (as of 2003) the 3 Brand that are able to make the Major Brand react are Red Hat on the Server, MySQL as the Database and JBoss as the Application Server. These are the Brands that also gaining awareness in the CTO level, in that they deliver functionality at a fraction of the cost.