Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010

Gartner has released a few days ago the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010 list. Here you can see the wordle cloud:

While I don't want to spend time talking about  the usual suspects (Cloud, Green, Mobile and Virtualization) I wish to share my thoughts on two topics: Advanced Analytics and Reshaping the Data Center.

Advanced Analytics  
I'm not surprised that a branch of Business Intelligence is still in the list after years of top priority amongst CIOs. Business Intelligence is one of the fields that I love and it's promise is to transform in gold everything it touches, like King Midas. Why is this still on the list? Has something changed in these years?
There are good news. Open Source Software is changing the competitive landscape allowing CIOs, BI Managers and End Users to gather deep insight into business data at a fraction of the cost. I'd like to mention some of the most interesting technologies in the Open Source ecosystem:

• MySQL - This is my favourite! ;) 
• Infobright - A leading columnar storage engine for MySQL;
• Pentaho - End to End Business Intelligence Suite;
• Jaspersoft - Open Source Business Intelligence Suite;
• Talend - Open Source ETL/Data Integration Suite;

This list is partial, but it witness the vitality of Open Source into this particular field. And with this I'll move to the next topic.

Reshaping the Data Center

Gartners is clearly saying: "Dear CIOs, IT Architects and CTOs: your datacenter has been designed twenty years ago... it's time to change."
As MySQL we've promoted a scale-out approach and reading through the lines of Gartner's research it seems that this has proved to be a sound strategy to reduce costs in time of economical crisis.

In conclusion I think that nowadays we cannot avoid to include an Open Source strategy in our plans for the future, whilst not excluding a mix of all the emerging technologies, like Cloud and Virtualization.

Regards,
Luca

Supporting Bioinformatics with Open Source

Yesterday we realeased the press release titled "Italy's CASPUR Relies on MySQL Enterprise to Support its Scientific Research" and I want to spend a few lines in commenting it.

First of all it was a pleasant surprise for me how extensively MySQL in particular and Open Source Software in general is pervasive into scientific research. I particularly appreciated a quote from Caspur:

CASPUR selected MySQL™ because it is a top database choice for the Bioinformatics industry, preferred by both application developers and the computational biology research community, thanks to its simplicity and high-performance.

One of the reasons why they have chosen MySQL answers a common question asked by our user base. The reason is high-performance, and the concern is about MySQL scalability.

We usually address these topics by talking about our huge customer base in the Web, citing Google, Facebook or Yahoo! is usually a good proof that MySQL can scale if the right architecture is chooses. We also highlight the fact that MySQL Cluster is powering the world most demanding telecommunication application and this is convincing as well.

CASPUR is using MySQL on a 2048 core cluster system for High Performance Computing (HPC) and it is a completely different story; it's all about science. It's all about analyzing huge amounts of data for the advantage of the human being. MySQL and Open Source Software are helping humanity; we are honored to have such customers.

Luca

Web Based Seminars (aka Webinars), why not?

On Thursday the 8th, we delivered the most successful italian MySQL webinar ever. We had about 350 registrations, thanks for your support and constant participation!
We also awarded a wonderful MySQL t-shirt to the one who first answered correctly to a trivia question, congratulations to the winner.

Looking into the story of italian webinars, here is the ranking in terms of registrations:

1. Getting Started with MySQL on Windows
2. Scalable MySQL High Availability Architectures
3. A guide to Scaling MySQL
4. MySQL Performance Tuning - Top 5 Tips
5. Introducing MySQL 5.0

If you were unable to participate you can click here and listen to the on-demand versions. Others noteworthy webinars are the one that we delivered with our partners:

• Pentaho
• Infobright and Talend

In conclusion, what I've learned from this fulfilling experience?
Delivering web based seminars (webinars for short) is a great way to stay in touch with customers and to address specific topics. This powerful tool can be used to update on product directions, sales offers, technical topics and present joint partner solutions. The audience can sit in the comfort of their home or office and receive a quick update without spending too much time or money.
If you are a Sales Engineer, Sales Manager, Marketing Manager, Product Manager or if you simply want to stay virtually in touch with your users, this is a delivery method worth of consideration.

Do you have advices on a topic that you wish to hear in the upcoming italian MySQL webinars? Please comment this post and we'll examine your ideas.

Getting Started with MySQL on Windows

For the italian session, we have just broken the 300 participants barrier and we aim to reach 400 registrants. The webinar will be held tomorrow morning at 10am (CET) in italian; you still have time to register here.
Please help us to overachieve this goal!

In this presentation we'll cover the benefits of deploying MySQL on Windows. You will learn the basic “How-To’s” of installation, security and configuration. We will show you how to start using MySQL tools on Windows, such as MySQL Workbench and MySQL Enterprise Monitor with the new Query Analyzer. If you are interested in learning how to get started with MySQL on Windows this webinar is for you.

To have more informations on this topic, please go to our Get Started with MySQL page. If you don't speak italian, you can register to the upcoming english EMEA session here.

MySQL is Emerging in the Emerging Markets

A survey of more than 400 developers showed that MySQL is closing the lead Microsoft's SQL server has in emerging markets. More than 50 percent of developers in the emerging market countries said they are using Microsoft's SQL Server, but 46 percent said they are using MySQL.

This is another great news, after the results coming from the european SMBs survey. The adoption and usage of MySQL is still growing despite the economic downturn. Go MySQL!

MySQL, Open Source, SMBs and my Home Country

I know that you may have read about it before, but I want to summarize some interesting evolutions of MySQL and the Open Source adoption in Europe.
I will reflect on it with a specific focus on Italy, for two reasons: Italy is my home country and is of the territories where I work as a Sales Engineer (together with Iberia and Emerging Markets).

MySQL has just released survey of 637 small and medium-size businesses (less than 500 employees) in Europe documenting open source usage. According to the survey the future will be full of satisfaction for MySQL.

You can read the comments in Zack's post here. I just want to highlight a few notable facts in the survey:

• More that 50% of interviewed companies are using open source software and Italy is in the top 3, behind Germany and France;
• When asked if they intend to increase the usage of MySQL, this time Italian companies are at the top, planning to expand the adoption by 64%;
• In two years only 15% of Italian SMBs will not use have any open source product in their infrastructure;
• 57% of Italian users are taking advantage of open source for critical projects;
• Top reasons for adopting MySQL are: cost savings, performance and scalability and ease of use;

I always considered my country as part of the late majority in the technology adoption lifecycle, but this time I'm very proud that we are amongst the top open source adopters. Another interpretation of this phenomenon is that open source is really main stream now and thus we are not as ingenious as I may think, but this is another story. :-)

If you want to stay updated on what I'm doing, feel free to follow me on twitter or get in touch via LinkedIn. According to the survey, the MySQL team will work a lot in the next months!