It’s a small, but noteworthy announcement, because here again you see open source opening the door for SMBs to enterprise-grade functionality. MDM (and as a subset, CDI) has, until recently, remained an IT function relegated to larger businesses with bigger budgets. But here you see Talend breaking the mold via open source for two important implications.

This is the only open source MDM offering (other than the Sun “Mural” project, whose future is unclear due to the Oracle purchase) and opens the technology up to smaller businesses looking to dip their toes in the MDM waters but don’t want to shell out millions on a proprietary MDM hub technology. It would be great to see this bring about some pricing pressure on existing MDM vendors. For a fraction of the cost, an SMB could be leveraging Sugar Community Edition sitting atop Talend’s MDM open source version and gaining the same advantages that enterprises are enjoying by breaking down the silos of customer data residing in disparate sources.

In addition, it could put pressure on other data integrators to offer their own MDM solutions, with open source once again acting as a catalyst through which to jumpstart a particular application set and lowering the TCO for customers.

But you’re starting to see M&A activity reflect the blurring boundaries between hardware and software as hardware makers and software providers look for closer cohesion. Intel’s purchase of Wind River Systems is one example within the consumer electronics market.

Cloud computing is proving another big driver. Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems gives the company access to Sun’s high-end servers, which it can bundle with database and business software products. I’ve also read that EMC has made moves to acquire Data Domain, which I imagine is partly driven by the attraction of Data Domain’s data duplication filtering; useful for data centers powering cloud computing.

I think the industry-wide push towards cloud computing will continue to prompt bigger companies to look for smaller acquisitions to fill in niche gaps within their product portfolio’s or to help lay the foundation for future cloud offerings. In addition, the economy and indexes such as the S&P 500 help, as growing belief that valuations are as low as they’re likely to get will help fuel further acquisitions.

As noted in his recent blog post – April was a banner month for deals, even in this economy. Total deals in the sector were valued at $21 billion. Of course, this is buoyed by the Oracle/Sun transaction. But the big deals, and smatterings of smaller tech M&A might be a good omen for the economy.

The flow of cash and stock is always a good thing…next up – fingers crossed – some non-M&A based exits to really get the fires going in the tech industry and economy at large.

Cloud computing still has a long way to go before it reaches the enterprise mainstream, but it’s obvious that open source and cloud computing are on intersecting courses. Nearly all of the cloud players are also big contributors to the open source market in one way or another.

In the context of Sun Microsystem’s new cloud offering, I’m really impressed with the cloud service APIs the vendor is leveraging whose specifications are published under a Creative Commons license, which in many ways parallels open source licensing in giving the customer freedom. But the end result speaks to what Microsoft was getting at in terms of flexibility, it gives the customer the ability to build any type of cloud, hybrid or not, AND the ability to take your data and build an alternative to Sun’s offering yet still remain compatible with it.

The survey results will be announced during an OSBC panel discussion on March 24th at the OSBC event at the Palace Hotel. The panel will feature a number of open source executives, including our own John Roberts and Sun/MySQL head honcho Marten Mickos.

The survey is quick and painless, and as I can attest from years past, it is always interesting to see the results when it comes to where we all see open source heading…

“With less “free” floating around, a more regular supply and demand dynamic can take hold, customers will have to pay for the things that are important to them and non-quantized growth dynamics can return. In the meantime, why should consumers pay for products and services that VCs and their pension fund investors are willing to give away for free?”

But there are higher laws working here and we are never going back. Why? Because scarcity is inherently opposed to the digital age. Proprietary software companies (think Microsoft, Oracle) got away with it before the Internet became mainstream. But the digital world is now distributed and new laws are taking hold. Scarcity is artificial. Abundance is natural.

That is a good thing for consumers. The question is how can companies adapt. Hank mentions a couple of examples of companies who have successfully employed the free model – 37Signals and SmugMug – but is at a loss to name others. I would add MySQL, Zimbra, Alfresco, WordPress and SugarCRM. Sun is betting its business on this model.

Yes, many old companies will go away and many Web 2.0 companies will dry up (as an aside, I am beginning to think of the definition of Web 2.0 is having “no identified buyer for your product and services”). But that is creative destruction at work. It will be painful, but ultimately, companies who focus on delivering excellent products and services will still be rewarded. And then they can “dump” more free products on to the market.

Nor is it hurting for competition, as CEO Andy Astor has made it perfectly clear that it intends to go “straight after MySQL in the marketplace with a dramatically more robust database…that has excellent tooling, is faster than MySQL in transactional environments, and is far more scalable.”

EnterpriseDB, which has labeled itself as an open source database provider and a database that has “Oracle performance and interoperability at a fraction of the cost,” certainly has plenty of cash, but has always been short on open source distinction.

That said, EnterpriseDB took a big step in the right direction today with its announcement that it will open source its GridSQL BI and data warehousing engine under the GNU GPL Version 2.

All in all, whatever bite EnterpriseDB takes out of MySQL’s market share pie won’t do any harm. Competition breeds innovation and success, two traits that the open source database market will only benefit from. It should be fun to watch how it all plays out.

The broadcast caught my attention due to the fact that Lyons was SugarCRM’s keynote speaker at our annual conference last month…and an immensely funny guy. He doesn’t fail to disappoint in this radio interview, during which he speaks to everything from Microsoft, business journalism, Linux, and “freetards.”

Make sure to check it out…you won’t regret it.

So, when Sun performed some scalability tests for SugarCRM, it was refreshing to see others see the same kinds of scalability and performance. The conclusion of the test sums it up nicely:

In our tests we found that the Sun’s Coolthreads server can scale to large number of concurrent users on a single server running both SugarCRM and MySQL. There is not much performance impact if the MySQL is run inside Solaris Containers vs running it in the global zone along with SugarCRM. At 700 concurrent user load we only saw 15% of the network bandwidth used and still left with enough cpu cycles. Sun’s Coolthreads server does scale well with the SAMP stack based applications more specifically SugarCRM and MySQL database.

Pretty cool…Sun is fast becoming THE open source company. I like how much Jonathan understands the way open source can and should work in a commercial entity like Sun. (And his defense of open source in his recent blog – which mentions SugarCRM as a leading provider – doesn’t hurt either…)