Monday, I’m off to the Sun-MySQL Integration Offsite in Menlo Park. That’s where we’re going to plan the next steps of making MySQL a part of Sun. It’s a three-day offsite, from Tuesday to Thursday, and I’m looking forward to meeting with many new colleagues.

Integrating companies is never easy, and I don’t expect this integration to be trivial, either. But thinking about the many cultural similarities between MySQL and Sun, about our mutual commitment to Open Source, about the positive reception of the acquisition by MySQL employees, and about the positive reception also from the side of Sun, I think we’re in for a great ride and some exciting times, in the best sense of the words.

Sun, here we come!

I spent a couple of hours on Friday at Sun’s office in Finland. It was a visit full of mutual anticipation.

Until the deal is closed, Sun and MySQL are merely planning joint activities, with execution happening once the deal is closed. Already now, lots of touching points were revealed in the informal discussions with Margot Wik, Thomas Branders and their colleagues. It seems both Sun and MySQL have a hard time not going into detail, but such are the rules of the game.

Before Sun Finland’s Friday afternoon coffee, Margot, Thomas and I picked the opportunity to drop by at Teknologföreningen, the Swedish language student corporation at Helsinki University of Technology. That’s the place where I learned to know Margot and Thomas, as well as our CEO Mårten, and many others. And where I “learned” how to sing Helan går. Some things hadn’t changed much since the early 1980s. Oh, perhaps our age. Margot was looking out for classmates from school, not of her own, but of her eldest son.

The afternoon coffee drew what I understood to be a large crowd. Sun Finland has about 130 employees, and I counted over 60 coffee and tea drinkers. With Finland being the country where most of MySQL’s original code was written, I spent some time explaining the early days of MySQL, both pre-1995 (when MySQL was first released) and pre-2001 (when VC funding started the commercial growth of MySQL). We then quickly moved on to more current issues, and my impression was that the Sun guys in Finland have a hard time waiting for the action to start.

I could imagine less fortunate stars, under which to start an integration process!

Two employees of Sun Finland, Margot Wik (whom I studied French with in the 1980s at the Helsinki University of Technology) and Thomas Branders (another fellow HUT student, from whom I tried to learn how to sing Helan går while having fun at HUT’s Swedish language student corporation Teknologföreningen, but don’t blame him for the end result on YouTube) invited me to Sun Finland’s Friday Coffee Meeting 25.1.2008 at about 14:00. I was happy to accept. It’s only natural to do the inaugural ambassador visit in my native country.

I’m looking forward to learning from Margot, Tomi and their colleagues, and telling them about MySQL!