Interview: MySQL rides open source wave into DBs

IDGNS: Has Yahoo replaced instances of Oracle or IBM, or are you running alongside them?

Free IT resource Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) May 22-23, 2007 Sponsored by OSBC Free IT resource TechNet: More ways to know it, share it, and keep it running. Sponsored by Microsoft

MM: Yahoo is an Oracle shop as well. That's a typical situation. Our best successes are typically in companies that also run Oracle or IBM or Microsoft and then bring us in where it makes sense.

IDGNS: How many paying customers do you have now compared to a year ago, and where do you expect to be in a year's time?

MM: We had roughly 3,000 a year ago, and we have 4,000 now. It is growing rapidly so, if we added 1,000 last year we'll add roughly 2,000 to 3,000 this year.

IDGNS: A big concern for business customers is the availability of support services. As the number of paying customers increases, how will you maintain an acceptable level of support?

MM: I'd say it's easier for us to provide worldwide support than for some of the big vendors who are struggling with heavy infrastructures that hamper the deployment of support services. I think our model scales better than theirs. We've been providing 24/7 support since 1999.

IDGNS: So will you add new support staff as you get more customers?

MM: We'll grow the staff, we'll also use systems to automate the tracking of (support incidents), we're already doing that. Selling support is a high margin business for us.

IDGNS: How about certification programs for database administrators?

MM: We just launched a certification program a few weeks ago that's now up and running. It's offered worldwide.

IDGNS: You have about 70 staff today. How many do you expect to have in a year?

MM: The full company will probably be more than 150.

IDGNS: You say you have about 4 million installations of your product worldwide, but only around 4,000 paying customers. Is your goal to increase the proportion of paying customers, and how will you do that?

MM: Our goal is not linked to the proportion at all, we want to grow in absolute measures. One goal is to grow our business with paying customers, the other is to grow the free user community. Whether the proportions go up or down is irrelevant.

IDGNS: You said in your speech (at the user show) that your sales and customer base both tripled last year. Are you profitable?

MM: We are now breaking even so, on a quarterly basis we are profitable. Last year was not a profitable year, that's something we decided on. We had a much better bottom line than we had planned for, but we had (not planned to be profitable). We are well funded so there's no concern there. We brought in some venture capital and we haven't used it yet.

IDGNS: What will you do with the product over the next year? Are you adding features to make it more attractive for big business customers?

MM: If it is a commodity market then the same product will serve all customers, so that is a moot question. But we are adding features that people have been asking for -- stored procedures, triggers, views, things like that. Those are needed by enterprises.