It is not often that a major technology vendor surprises the market with a move that appears to go against much of what the company has previously stood for.
However, that is exactly what happened when Microsoft announced that it would make available next year a version of SQL Server 2016 to run on Linux.
That statement takes a little bit of getting used to.
Former CEO Steve Ballmer famously said that Linux was a “cancer”.
“Woe betide the vendor that refuses customer flexibility or interoperability demands”
“Linux is not in the public domain. Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That’s the way that the license works,” he said. (Chicago Sun Times, June 2001)
That is a pretty strong stance to take, but it is also one that has been gradually eroded as Linux developed in some unexpected directions. The erosion of Ballmer’s stance is best characterised by Microsoft’s laudable recent work with Red Hat to ensure not only interoperability, but mutual support in each other’s virtual environments.
SQL Server
Flash forward then to 2016 and the final stages of preparation of SQL Server 2016 for general availability. With leadership in several Gartner Magic Quadrants, independent verification of the least vulnerable database platform for a sixth year and class leading TCO and performance in data warehousing, as well as in-built analytics and mobile end to end availability, and SQL Server 2016 is arguably the best all round database platform on the market — and there’s the rub.
SQL Server’s main competitors are not constrained by a single operating environment. Now it could be argued that with the cloud, virtualisation and other permutations, neither is SQL server, but still, you can almost hear the conversation.
“We’ve got the best database in the world, but being only a Windows application is holding us back,” said someone. Whoever broached that subject first is a truly brave person.
But it makes all kinds of sense and is a brave move by Microsoft that will obviously open up new opportunities for it and good luck to it.
Demand
Back to that premise in the strap line though, and what does it have in common the 12” iPad Pro and Oracle’s engineered systems that are ‘building blocks for the cloud’?
Well, all of these developments are driven by user demand and not necessarily what the respective vendors had envisaged.
In the case of Oracle, it was more a realisation of where things were going, that they not only offer database appliances, but as announced at OpenWorld last year, analytics appliances and also plain old servers that Larry Ellison described as the same machines that Oracle is using to build its own cloud platforms, thus making it easier for organisations to transition to the cloud when they were ready to do so. For a company that was originally highly sceptical of cloud at all, once the realisation was made of where things were going, it went the whole hog.
Apple was somewhat behind the demand curve and, arguably, it was not until the success of two in one devices, such as the Surface Pro line, that it realised that a bigger iPad that could function as a laptop was required. Even so, it was probably rumoured even longer than its development cycle and only emerged last year — and an excellent device it is.
Always right
So for Microsoft to surprise the market with SQL Server on Linux is a huge development that shows a company that has matured beyond old rivalries to understand that when it comes to choice, the customer is still always right.
Vendors in general are coming round to the idea that walled gardens, protected ecosystems and virtual monopolies are a thing of the past and they not serve a useful purpose any more.
There will always be the ‘better together’ argument that says a unified, homogeneous stack performs best, but if that is not what a customer wants and there is a valid reason to run someone else’s tech in there at whatever layer is needed, then it cannot be ignored and must be accommodated. If not, woe betide the vendor that refuses customer flexibility or interoperability demands.
The examples are there now, of old rivalries set aside to facilitate choice and flexibility. If Microsoft and Red Hat can do it, and Microsoft and Apple can do it, there really are no limits.
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