451 CAOS Theory 
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IBM (kind of) explains its investment in EnterpriseDB
Matthew Aslett, March 26, 2008 @ 11:22 am ETIBM has got back to me with a terse response to some questions I posed following its investment in EnterpriseDB earlier this week (sample Q&A: Q. Is the investment a response to Sun’s acquisition of MySQL? A. No). What IBM does not say is in fact as revealing as what it does say, however.
Here’s the official line:
“IBM has become a minority shareholder of EnterpriseDB. This affords us an opportunity to continue to participate in, and gain further insight into, the open source community. This complements other experiences such as with the Linux, Apache and Eclipse communities and previous investments we’ve made in Red Hat and Novell. IBM has been a long-time supporter of Open Source communities, and we continue to see interest among our clients for Linux and other Open Sources solutions. This investment supports our overall strategy to support Open Source solutions in the marketplace to further enable our customers to implement business-critical solutions.”
I speculated yesterday on how IBM might go to market with EnterpriseDB to challenge Oracle and Sun, but it seems the company is in no rush to expand its support for EnterpriseDB Postgres Plus Advanced Server. “There is no impact on our product support plans,” is the official line. Advanced Server 8.2 already runs on Red Hat and Novell on System z mainframes and on AIX on System p servers, and IBM is not speculating on support plans beyond that.
IBM also declined comment on potential support for PostgreSQL (either directly or through EnterpriseDB), or why it didn’t simply just acquire EnterpriseDB (although EnterpriseDB CEO, Andy Astor, noted yesterday that the company is “not for sale” in any case.
UPDATE - It was pointed out to me during OSBC that IBM’s investments usually come out of the budget of a specific business unit. Assuming that is the case here, it is worth stating that IBM’s answers were supplied “from the perspective of” the Linux and System p businesses “in consultation with Information Management Software”.
Categories: Funding, Software
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IBM took a similar investment position with Red Hat waay back in the day, and also with Eclipse and other open source stars. They (IBM) have pioneered the model of ’sponsor’: invest enough to see a company grow and stabilize, but not so much as to overtly direct or smother a company. They “get it”: you need to see that good parts of the Open Source universe prosper and succeed, but you cannot dominate any single part of it, or the creativity and community will suffer. For example, if IBM had simply acquired Red Hat (widely speculated in 2001 and 2002), then HP, Dell, and others would have stopped contributing their bits into the drivers and overall support– it would have died, and IBM would not reap the benefits of the commons. Here, similarly, it seems, IBM sees that EnterpriseDB has proven their chops as a potential corporate shell for Postgres, and so IBM wants to see them prosper, but they do not want to overplay their hand to the point where other large companies will stop participating.
Good point Dave, I just remembered they also backed Turbolinux as well, which kind of backs up your point.