Oracle Acquisition of Sun May Spark Resurgence of Java and Faster Growth of MySQL According to New Survey of Open Source Developers and Enterprise Customers

SAN FRANCISCO, July 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Jaspersoft, the world's most widely used business intelligence platform, today released the findings of a global survey of open source community members about the future of Java and MySQL under Oracle (ORCL). Contrary to dark predictions by many in the open source community prior to its acquisition of Sun, Oracle was viewed by most respondents as a better steward of Java and MySQL than Sun. Indeed, most large organizations planned to use more Java than before and most expected to see MySQL innovate and improve faster under Oracle than under Sun.

"Our open source BI solutions are built with Java and many customers use our products to access data stored in MySQL, so we are interested in how our customers and community view the future of Java and MySQL under Oracle," said Brian Gentile, CEO of Jaspersoft. "It's clear that our enterprise customers and community are prepared to give Oracle the benefit of the doubt. And it's likely that the software industry may see a resurgence in the use of Java, good news for the massive investments made by many organizations and professionals in this programming language."

The Jaspersoft survey was conducted in April 2010 using a random sampling of Jaspersoft community members and customers and resulted in over 500 respondents. Most respondents held development and engineering roles within their organizations and nearly 15 percent worked for organizations with more than 5,000 employees, including Accenture (ACN), DHL, Princess Cruises (CUK), Quest Diagnostics (DGX), Siemens (SI), United Airlines (UAUA), Wachovia (WB) and Wells Fargo (WFC), among others.

To download a copy of the complete survey results, go to http://www.jaspersoft.com/whitepaper-OSS-oracle-sun-survey.

Open source software adoption in global enterprises has maintained a remarkable pace in recent years. Leading IT market research and advisory firm, IDC, forecasts* that worldwide open source software (OSS) revenues would exceed $8 billion by 2013, with an annual compound growth rate of 22.4%, exceeding almost every other software category in annual increases.

Survey Results

MySQL is the world's most popular relational database and the default relational storage engine in most open source enterprise software stacks. Java is the most popular language for writing open source enterprise applications. With its acquisition of Sun, Oracle has positioned itself to control substantial portions of both the open source and proprietary enterprise software stacks most commonly deployed in production today.

Jaspersoft's survey asked customers and community members, among other things, about their views on:

• Their use of MySQL
• The development and innovation of MySQL
• The use of Java
• The Java Community Process

Among the survey highlights, Jaspersoft found:

• 43 percent of respondents believe MySQL development and innovation will improve under Oracle;
• 80 percent of respondents believe the Java process will improve or stay the same;
• The most popular alternative to MySQL cited by respondents who said they planned to switch databases away from Oracle, is PostgreSQL. But only five percent indicated they would switch.

Jaspersoft's survey revealed that 59 percent of survey respondents were not aware that Oracle reorganized and established a completely separate MySQL business unit from Oracle's traditional RDBMS business, which includes separate and dedicated engineering, professional services, sales and marketing.

"It was a misconception to think Oracle would kill off MySQL," said Michael Fauscette, Group Vice President of Software Business Solutions at IDC research firm. "Oracle is not new to open source software with projects like InnoDB, Unbreakable Linux, Berkley DB, etc. and with the addition of Sun's portfolio of OSS, Oracle arguably became the world's largest OSS vendor. Oracle continues to target MySQL to areas of the market where MySQL is a good fit over Oracle's database products (small and medium business for example). What's interesting now is seeing if Oracle can improve transparency, openness and foster stronger communities, something Sun was consistently criticized for."

"Everyone involved in enterprise open source will be watching Oracle closely in September 2010 when they host Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle Develop and JavaOne," said Giulio Toffoli, senior software engineer and co-founder of Jaspersoft. "Those conferences will mark the one-year anniversary of the Sun deal and we'll know a lot more about whether Oracle is keeping its promises to customers and developers about Java and MySQL."

*IDC, Worldwide Open Source Software 2009 – 2013 Forecast, Doc #219260, July 2009

About Jaspersoft

Jaspersoft's open source business intelligence is the world's most widely used BI software, with nearly 11 million product downloads worldwide and 13,000 commercial customers in 100 countries. Jaspersoft provides a web-based, open and modular approach to the evolving business intelligence needs of the enterprise and is the only BI vendor enabling true multi-tenancy while providing a common platform for on-premise, virtualized, SaaS and cloud deployments. Jaspersoft's products span the continuum of core BI requirements, including production reporting, operational & embedded reporting and analysis, interactive end-user query and reporting, dashboards and mash-ups, data analysis and data integration. Its BI software is updated constantly by a community of nearly 150,000 registered members working on more than 350 projects, which represents the world's largest business intelligence community. More information is available at http://www.jaspersoft.com and http://www.jasperforge.org.

SOURCE Jaspersoft Corporation