In today's economic climate, IT departments must control and accurately assess the total costs of any purchase. This can be particularly hard to do when a solution is comprised of multiple products from different vendors: as the number of cost variables rises, usually so do complexity and cost. IT appliances, which offer complete turn-key solutions from a single vendor, help contain this risk. Appliances provide all of the software and hardware necessary to deliver a function specific, all-in-one solution. They eliminate much of the cost, complexity and guessing inherent in self-assembled solutions.

To deliver low TCO, high performance, full functionality, and general ease of use, all of an appliance's constituent products must provide the same. Using MySQL enables appliance vendors to::

• Deliver a Differentiated Solution that can capture, store, and report on data with speed and granularity by embedding a full-featured, relational database. My SQL provides the performance and reliability necessary to meet the needs of both large and small enterprises and doesn't limit growth into new markets.
• Bring Products to Market Faster by embedding a proven database rather than building and maintaining a database in-house, or spending time on difficult tuning and integration.
• Reduce COGS and improve profitability by using a highly cost efficient database that allows vendors to offer appliances at a fraction of the cost of competing solutions. This provides appliance vendors with the margin and pricing flexibility to appeal to Small and Medium Business (SMBs).
• Win Competitive Comparisons using a SQL-compliant, relational database with superior performance and reliability. The appliance market is growing and with each new entrant come new competitive pressures that force vendors to add new and more sophisticated capabilities. Using MySQL from the start ensures this can be done easily, and helps avoid the difficult and expensive task of having to migrate products and customers to another database.
• Deliver a Zero Administration solution so customers don't have to hire dedicated DBA resources and the appliance vendor burdened by costly database-related support calls.

White Papers

• White Paper: Guide to Choosing an Embedded Database
• White Paper: "A Visual Guide to Installing MySQL in Windows Applications"

Other Resources

• Why Product Managers Choose MySQL (ISV)
• Why Engineering VPs Choose MySQL (ISV)
• MySQL as an Embedded Database
• ISV / OEM Customers
• ISV / OEM Resources