MySQL hits $50 million revenue, plans IPO

MySQL, purveyor of the open-source database of the same name, is on the road to becoming a publicly traded company, bolstered by $50 million in revenue in 2006.

"It's still in the pipeline," Chief Executive Marten Mickos said of the plan to hold an initial public offering of his company's stock. He declined to discuss when the company planned to go public, but said, "We're making good progress, doing all the things we need to get done."

During the days of dot-com mania, companies would go public without being profitable and in some cases without much in the way of revenue, and with investor enthusiasm bubbling at the time, many of them raised millions of dollars during their IPOs. MySQL, though, is working on building its business first.

The company garnered about $50 million in revenue in 2006, Mickos said in an interview at the MySQL Conference and Expo here. That compares with $6.5 million in 2002 and about $34 million in 2005, according to earlier figures Mickos cited in a speech two years earlier.

Of the company's bottom line, Mickos said, "Profitability isn't a specific goal yet, but we aren't burning cash. We go a bit above breakeven, a bit below breakeven."

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