MySQL Prepares To Go Public 150
prostoalex writes "MySQL CEO Marten Mickos told Computer Business Review the company plans to go public: 'Now entering its twelfth year, the company has built up just less than 10,000 paying customers, and an installed base estimated to be close to 10 million... When it does go public, MySQL will be one of only a handful of open source vendors to do so. Red Hat, VA Linux (now VA Software), and Caldera (now SCO Group) led the way in 1999 and 2000...'"
Re:Oracle aquisition (Score:5, Informative)
Re:10,000 customers? (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks for the questions!
The customer count is over several years. Yes, the majority of our users choose not to pay. The current ratio is something like 1 in 1,000. But as you probably know as an open source user, there is great benefit to a project also from the ones who don't pay.
Those who pay do it for the value-add they receive: production support, scheduled binaries with only bug fixes, the monitoring and advisory servce, etc. From a business perspective the great thing is that the ratio of paid to non-paid is changing and our business is steadily growing.
We are proud at MySQL to build something that has great value to the FOSS communities and is a great business at the same time.
Sorry to hear that you don't like MySQL, but great to see that you nevertheless take time to read
Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB
Not all public companies are worth billions (Score:4, Informative)
Not all public companies are worth as much as GE or WalMart. Vast numbers of public companies exist, and many are only worth a few million. 10k customers paying for support (we all know they need it) is still millions in revenue a year, more then enough to go public without being bogus.
Public != Billions.
Re:Is that 10,000 customers total over 12 years? (Score:3, Informative)
$4995 is still a heck of a lot less then a full time DBA.
Re:10,000 customers? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't like that MySQL does not keep my data safely and securely out of the box. Some examples:
I can't take MySQL seriously until this changes. I understand that you have backward compatibility concerns, but that's life - you pay a price for the poor decisions you've made in the past. You might have to go through a long deprecation period before you can get rid of these knobs. At the very least, don't have them flipped this way unless I start mysqld with the --treat-my-data-as-garbage command-line option.
If you fix this fundamental problem, I'll be impressed. I may not use your product, but I will stop laughing at it.
Re:10,000 customers? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cost (Score:2, Informative)
An IPO is an initial offer of stock for sale to the relatively general public -- primary market. Usually an equity syndicate team at one or more investment banks determine the best combination of price and quantity of shares to offer to maximize the capital raised for the company, while still making the value attractive to investors. Besides taking a cut of the capital raised, the banks might also buy some of the shares themselves before/after passing on the IPO offer to usually their most "valued" and "qualified" clients. If I remember correctly, the IPO for RedHat was $14 . If you don't get the "IPO", then you have to buy it once it opens on the open market -- the secondary market. If the stock is hot and has lots of hype, then it usually opens in the market much, much higher. It also technically shouldn't matter much if you buy 1 share for $100 or 10 shares at $10 each. It all depends on the perceived value per share. Other things to look at are earnings growth and/or dividends. I've enjoyed reading Jim Cramer's latest 2 books.
Disclaimer: This post is not an offer to buy or sell securities. Investing involves a lot of risk. You must determine for yourself your goals and risk tolerances... possibly with the help of a licensed financial services professional. I am not one, so please don't ask me!
Re:Capital isn't the problem. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:amen (Score:2, Informative)
What makes stockholders happy?
Rising stock prices.
How do companies like Red Hat make their revenue?
Maintenance subscriptions.
If customers are unhappy they will stop subscribing to maintenance.
If customers stop their subscriptions, Red Hat's revenue declines as do
their stock price. This makes stock holders unhappy.
So, there is a linkage.
Re:10,000 customers? (Score:3, Informative)
Try sqlyog. It's free and it kicks the ass of pgadmin any day.
Re:10,000 customers? (Score:3, Informative)
1) An admin utility (no, phpmyadmin doesn't count for crap) that doesn't suck. Please, just take pgadmin and make it connect to mysql. PLEASE. MySQL Administrator and MySQL Query Browser work very poorly.
HeidiSQL [heidisql.org]. it's sexy.
Re:Ramen (Score:3, Informative)
There are many different types of stockholder and although I agree going public inevitably opens up the company to the ones just looking for short term gain, its erroneous to think all stockholders think that way (many of the most savvy investors realise investing means potentially going in for the long haul). After all, unless your a hedge fund manager or such, then the chances of you making money from buying and selling stocks in the short term (i.e. less than a few years minimum) are actually pretty low.
Personally, I think the problem isn't as much about stockholders only being concerned about the short term - unless the company starts loosing money and/or avenues of revenue, when this happens stockholders do tend to panic and want random things changed - the problem is the possibility of stock holders seeing a good quality, well run, company (which happens to sell OSS) and buying a stake because they can see the company has potential but then attempting to shift the company towards a more conventional business model. This usually means less resources going towards the actual open source development and more emphasis on the revenue generating services on the side. I worry companies like Red Hat have been greatly affected from this stockholder driven change.
Re:Ramen (Score:4, Informative)
For example:
Company A floats on the stock market and it share are purchased by Companies B (15%), C (10%), D(20%), E(6%) and a handful of smaller investors (49% total).
When at their AGM Company A wishes to appoint a new director they have to put it out to vote. But each person gets to vote according to the number of shares in Company A that they own. So if the directors of companies B,C,D and E get together in private and decide who they would rather put in charge, there is nothing all the smaller investors can do as even if they all voted the same way they would still only have 49%.
Now the numbers I quote above are a complete exageration but it usually amounts to the same thing in the real world. Its just that the other comanies would be made up of 10 - 20 investment houses (instead of B C D and E) and they would not initially all agree. So they would trade favours for voting the way another company would prefer in return for the same thing happening in reverse when a vote came up they veiwed as more important to their business. The have the opportunity to do this as they are still only 10 - 20 fundmanagers who probably drink at the same bar / club anyway.
Whereas the smaller investors are spread across a much wider geographical location and are much less likely to have the opportunity to meet. They are also less likely to trade favours the same way fundmanagers can as they probably dont own stock in such a wide range of companies so any favours on offer are less likely to be relevant.
This is usually the way things turn out because most of us do not own shares in a company directly, but our pensions and savings are invested on our behalf. In return for investing our money for us, the investment houses and banks get to use the vote that comes with the shares.