SolidDB is going open source. What’s interesting to me about this is that this is a company that has had strong success with their proprietary channel, having 3 million implementations of any product is pretty damn impressive. However, the comments from the company about “scaling out” their business really gets to the heart of what is fundamentally broken in enterprise software today, sales and distribution. Having to rely on a small number of mega-vendors for distribution, or the prospect of investing significant amounts of capital in a direct-to-market sales channel, it doesn’t surprise me at all to see companies migrating to open source for go-to-market reasons alone. There is also no doubt some unit economics at work here as well given that cost of sales is one of the largest components of any enterprise deal for vendors.

A Non-Oracle Choice For MySQL?:

Paola Lubet, vice president of marketing and business development at Solid, told internetnews.com that Solid’s proprietary transaction storage engine technology has some 3 million installations and is included in HP’s OpenView application, among others.

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