Innovative competition.

This is very very interesting. In normal competition, competitors bad-mouth each other (Oracle says SAP is losing market share….), competitors buy out competition (Oracle bought Siebel, Peoplesoft, Berkeley DB which is one of the MySql storage engine options) but here IBM says to MySql, “We’ll help sell MySql databases”.

What do I think of IBM ?

I think they demonstrate wisdom in competition – they recognise MySql’s strength (and thus threat) and instead of channelling resource to try to snuff them out, IBM sees an opportunity and partners them to help them sell.

Does it threaten IBM’s DB2 (IBM’s database)? I don’t think so. Big budget customers tend to go for costlier databases like DB2, Oracle, Microsoft Sql Server. Tech savvy or budget constrained customers go for open-source databases like MySql.

The partnership also gives IBM immense credibility.

Despite all the flak that SAP levels at Oracle, most people do not believe the stuff that SAP says about Oracle and vice versa. In the same manner, most people will also take SAP’s and Oracle’s claims with a pinch of salt. If you churn out marketing talk all the time, you can also be just ‘marketing’ your products.

When a big company like IBM acknowledges that a competiting product is good and announces a partnership, I tend to think that the guys have more integrity.

Innovative competition.