Sun has announced that they will package their recently-acquired MySQL database server with their Glassfish application server together for a new price of $65,000 per annum. The Sun pricing model is a flat model per-customer and includes support and upgrades. Yesterday at Sun we heard their claim that most companies report saving up to 90% when switching from traditional enterprise database servers to MySQL.
With the Glassfish application server Sun is competing with JBoss (RedHat), Websphere from IBM, the Oracle application suite and many more. The commercial vendors control a vast majority of the revenue in the Java application server market, namely Oracle/BEA and IBM. Glassfish also competes directly with other open source application servers like JBoss and Tomcat. The usual fee for MySQL from Sun is $40,000 per year, so as part of this package Glassfish support and updates are being offered for an additional $25,000.
At the conference we attended yesterday, the Sun representatives spent a lot of time talking about their strategy of simplifying open source development and deployment by packaging components or modules together and attaching Sun services (support, etc.). This MySQL and Glassfish packaging is a part of that strategy, which is still in its formative stages but is likely to make the Sun product suite more attractive to enterprises looking for a full-stack single vendor solution.