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Open Source – the New Battleground for Market share
It seems that the big players have settled on their free database offerings and how are moving to go even deeper into the "convince people early on about platform choice" approach. With the Oracle/Sun deal under way, IBM has made moves to work with another open source provider and tools to move people off Oracle to the Postgres platform. Not *brand new* news, but taken in the context of the Oracle/Sun deal it’s intriguing. I would have though, frankly, that the different providers would be focused on their free versions as a way to get people off of the open source alternatives, not splintering the market into the open source, free edition, then paid edition.
It’s odd, in my opinion.
First, it makes the assumption that a significant amount of business (and obviously up-sell business) can be had by introducing someone to your style of database (not even brand!) by starting with open source. The assumption would have to be that this would need to lead to a sale later down the road, or at least prevent an account from going elsewhere, otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense at all. Does having an open source alternative really accomplish this? I’m not sure.
Second, the assumption simply has to be that once someone is working with your open source solution, you’ll be able to up- or cross-sell them. These companies are not non-profit; they have to have a business reason for doing what they’re doing and that means sales. I don’t have the inside track on this, but I do wonder why it’s perceived that once I’m on a totally different open source platform, that I’ll magically want to convert my world and move to your commercial database, with likely completely different interfaces, completely different support mechanisms, completely different… well, everything.
Is it a blind land-grab or do I just not get it yet? I’m OK hearing that I don’t get it, but I should would like to understand better what the business sense is for the customer in this type of acquisition/merger.
Any thoughts? Drop me a note.
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