I asked Paola Lubet, vice president of marketing for Solid Information Technology to fill me in on the company's strategy and especially on the reasons for their decision to make this an open source product. I also had heard that Oracle tried to undermine solid's efforts, so I was interested to know more about that as well. Below are her comments in question-and-answer format.
Q: Tell me about Solid's open source play. What's it all about?
A: Solid Information Technology is bringing its proven mission-critical database technology to the open source community. Solid is adapting its online transaction processing (OLTP) storage engine to work with MySQL server, allowing businesses to adopt open source relational databases for mission-critical applications.
Q: How would you briefly describe Solid Information Technology, its business and its target market?
A: Solid is a provider of database systems known to be very fast, always on, and flexible to adapt in different types of environments and deployments. High throughput, reliability and real-time data access requirements are the key drivers for where Solid is extremely successful. As such, about 75 percent of our current customer base is in the communications industry. Solid has also more than 150 enterprise customers in industries such as retail, financial services, manufacturing and healthcare. More than 3,000,000 copies of Solid are deployed in leading-edge products from market leaders such as Alcatel, Cisco, EMC2, HP, NEC, Nokia, Nortel and Siemens. These companies have chosen Solid to power their real-time applications delivering immediate and uninterrupted access to data and low operational costs to their users.
Q: Your note mentions a "significant alliance" with another company. Who is the other company and what can you tell me about the alliance and why this is important?
A: We are only announcing our open source initiative. On Monday, we are announcing our solidDB Storage Engine for MySQL. Please find the complete press release attached. More news will come on the relationship.
Q: What did Oracle do to try to undermine this alliance and why?
A: I can not comment about the relationship. If you refer to the fact Oracle has renewed its contract with MySQL for InnoDB, this doesn't undermine Solid's open source initiative. We have a better product to offer, a more flexible way of doing business and 100 percent customer reference ability. These are unique assets we bring to MySQL customers.
Q: What are your plans in terms of building a business strategy out of an open source effort?
A: Solid has been extremely successful over the past two years with a constant growth of 30 percent year after year. We have been looking at how to scale our business. The intelligence we have gathered proves there is a great interest in adopting open source relational databases in mission critical environments. The major road blocks to this adoption have been the lack of robust technology and mission critical support. This is Solid's bread and butter. By providing a technology component of our existing product line as a storage engine for MySQL, we can leverage the MySQL brand and community as a channel to promote the adoption of our technology. Additionally we can use the brand and community to promote the adoption of open source database for mission critical deployments.
Q: Why did you choose an open source strategy rather than a proprietary approach?
A: Solid believes both approaches are valid. We have been in the database business for 14 years with our proprietary product line. We plan to continue this business to serve the needs of our mission critical-customers that require functionalities such as sub-second failover and recovery, or the transaction speed that only an in-memory database can provide. We are taking the most commoditized piece of our technology and bringing it to the open source world, where its robustness and functionalities are much needed and ready to be adopted across all industries.
Q: What do you see in the future for open source development?
A: We think customers like the open source model because it provides transparency in the relationship between customer and supplier. It also provides customers the ability to share experiences with other users of the same technology. Ecosystems develop around open source products expanding the solution options available. As an example, virtually every development tool or management tool integrates with MySQL, providing its customers with a broad choice of implementations. We believe over time more and more sophisticated functionalities will be available as open source for a variety of solutions ranging from OS to middleware to end-user applications. We are going to learn about the need of our open source customers and evaluate what additional database functionality they might need and determine when to bring these to them.
Q: Anything else you would like to tell me about these latest developments?
A: We have the opportunity to move the adoption of open source database to the next level and offer to the broad market a proven technology that has been used by HP OpenView for the past 7 years. Siemens, Nortel and NEC use it in their most demanding control systems serving large subscriber populations. We are going to leverage the MySQL brand as a vehicle to promote the adoption of this technology and scale our business.
Q: What's the most exciting thing about this effort?
A: We believe we have the opportunity to become the de facto database engine for the enterprise market while continuing to innovate and serve the most demanding needs of real-time applications such as the ones used in next generation networks in the telecommunication industry.
AB -- 4/18/06
