eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Unisys, not known for being active in the open-source community, hooked up with a key global open-source partner May 16 by announcing a worldwide distribution agreement with Sweden-based database maker MySQL AB.
The new pact will enable Unisys, of Blue Bell, Pa., to resell MySQL premium software products and provide a wider array of consulting, integration and support services for customers implementing the open-source database in their infrastructures, Unisys said.
With this agreement in place, Unisys broadened its range of consulting, integration and support services for the MySQL product family to include MySQL Network subscriptions, MySQL Cluster and other products. The new agreement strengthens Unisys service capabilities for open-source stacks such as LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl), a company spokesman said.
Unisys has supplied only database consulting services for MySQL and other database systems within its portfolio during the past few years. Most of those services consisted of providing public- and private-sector organizations with migration, high-availability architecture and design, performance optimization and tuning, administration, and management across the open-source stack, the company said.
“Unisys also has working partnerships with Red Hat, Novell [for SUSE Linux] and [application server maker] JBoss,” Unisys spokesman Brian Daly told eWEEK. “This, however, is the first formal resale agreement we have made with MySQL.”
MySQL claims to have more than10 million active installations worldwide.
“Combining Unisys services with MySQLs database software can help our joint customers attain the flexibility in IT deployment and operational benefits that open source can deliver,” said Ulf Sandberg, MySQL vice president of customer services.
Unisys said it will optimize MySQL for its own platforms and will conduct performance and scalability testing in cooperation with the database servers own developers. In addition, Unisys intends to deploy a new global team of MySQL-certified consultants who can migrate, implement and optimize MySQL throughout an enterprise, the spokesman said.
These Unisys consultants will become key members of the companys planned new series of global open-source centers, where customers can benchmark and test business-critical applications employing the database in a lab environment before moving them into production.