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MySQL’s CEO, Martin Mikos, recently shared his tips for how to build scale with an emerging model and compete against incumbent enterprise software vendors.

After installing and evaluating a number of different software applications recently, from install, to reinstall to frustration there's a number of enterprise software CEO's I'd like to send the following tip to:

Our “secret sauce” for building scale has always been to make adoption easy. We set out to make MySQL the easiest database on the planet to use. When the product launched, we were one of the first open source companies to place an emphasis on a thorough user manual. We responded to every email from users and included a reference to the user manual in every response to be sure the answer was contained in the document.

When I started my career in IONA Technologies where we shipped shrink wrapped enterprise software and our aim was to provide an "out of the box experience" to software developers that was superior to the consultant driven middleware solutions available at the time. While not quite as direct as MySQL's goal to "make MySQL the easiest database on the planet to use" I fully believe it's one of the reasons IONA were so successful in the late '90s. After IONA I moved to a financial trading company where I got to experience BEA's CORBA offering which left me longing for IONA's one CD install and easy to compile examples.

In the enterprise application world ( where I find myself these days ) it's often too easy to rely on on-site consultants and gloss over the out of the box experience which I believe is a mistake. If an end user cannot install and evaluate the essence of your product within 30 minutes then I believe that product is not focused on the customer and faces greater challenges than just being hard to install.

For the full article from Martin Mickos of MySQL see: "How to be a Disrupter"