Sleepycat to extend paw into Asia

Sleepycat Software is looking seriously at setting up operations in Asia and has ambitious hopes for its XML (Extensible Markup Language) and Java embedded open-source databases. The company introduced version 2.0 of its Berkeley DB Java Edition (JE) Monday.

IDG News Service chatted with the head feline at the 30-person privately held firm, Sleepycat President and Chief Executive Officer Mike Olson, about the company's genesis and the statistic Sleepycat loves to throw around -- the estimated 200 million deployments of its Berkeley DB software. The firm's customers include Amazon.com, America Online (AOL), Cisco Systems, EMC, Google, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola. Sleepycat pioneered a dual licensing model for its products, a no-cost open-source license allowing redistribution if the application using the database is open source, and a commercial license for the redistribution of proprietary applications.

Olson was in at the start of what would later become Sleepycat, being one of the original authors of Berkeley DB, while studying at the University of California at Berkeley. He then worked at object relational database company Illustra and later its purchaser Informix Software. Olson joined Sleepycat in 1998 as vice president of sales and marketing, becoming company president and CEO in 2001. The company's headquarters are in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and it has offices in Emeryville, California, and Woking, U.K.

What follows is an edited transcript of the interview with Olson.

IDGNS: Where does that 200 million figure for Berkeley DB deployments come from?

Olson: We have a very large installed base. It's north of 200 million today. The number may sound outrageous, but every single copy of Linux, Solaris and Mac server includes Berkeley DB, also products from vendors like Nokia and Ericsson include our database. We got someone to measure our installed base some years ago, but we haven't redone it. The number getting bigger doesn't help us from a business perspective.

IDGNS: So, what's the Sleepycat story? The company was founded in 1996.

Olson: You have to go further back than that. In 1991, Keith Bostic was a staff member and Margo Seltzer and I were grad students at the University of California at Berkeley working on database technology for Michael Stonebraker. We were working on BSD [Berkeley software distribution, a derivative of AT&T Bell Laboratories' Unix]. Keith needed to replace all the AT&T proprietary software with the BSD Unix and he was working on a component DBM [database management] in the Unix library. Keith knew Margo and I particularly well and asked the two of us to write a replacement library. [Bostic is Sleepycat's vice president of product development, while fellow cofounder Seltzer is the company's chief technology officer.]

We wrote the original version of Berkeley DB in 1991. Then I totally forgot about it. I joined Illustra with Stonebraker [llustra's founder]. Keith and Margo continued to maintain and evolve Berkeley DB throughout the early 1990s. It was pretty popular and freely available and lots of projects chose to use it. By the mid-90s, it was pretty big and really grew by word of mouth and there was increasing demand for an enterprise upgrade. Users needed more reliability and recovery as opposed to the academic version of the software.