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May 28, 2009

Database provider Ingres has made alliances with the Linux community and other open source operating system integrators, in an effort to fend off its biggest rival, database giant Oracle.

To be sure, Ingres and Linux vendor Red Hat have been in talks for several weeks, ever since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems on April 20.

On April 23rd, Ingres said it was signing up as a charter member of the Open Source Channel Alliance created by Red Hat and Synnex, an IT distributor with more than 15,000 channel partners in the U.S., Canada and Mexico to help promote open source solutions.

Yesterday, Red Hat and Ingres launched the "Ingres Development Stack for JBoss" which is a package comprised of the Ingres 9.2 database and the JBoss Developer Studio and Enterprise Application server, all pre integrated and ready to run on top Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

Ingres was simply boasting how it had partnered with Red Hat on a number of deals to marry the Ingres relational database with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise middleware to help them reduce costs.

So now Ingres is adding the fine-tuning it has done on the Ingres database for the RHEL and JBoss as well as the integration it has done to link the database to the JBoss middleware and packaging it up into a 90-day evaluation version.

The bundle isn't "crippleware". All the features are activated and now programmers can have it up and running on a RHEL server in 10 to 15 minutes instead of spending half a day configuring it to work.

Ingres product marketing manager Deb Woods says "we're not just interested in supplying another database. Organizations want to really cut costs and programmers and system integrators want to get started rapidly."

Woods says that support for one year for the elements in the development stack when deployed on a production four-socket, four-core x64 server will run to about $39,000 - not including Linux support - but that a set of Oracle database and BEA WebLogic application server and development tools can run to as much as $700,000 on the same system.

"There is of course a huge difference in price between open source tools and an Oracle stack," Woods was quick to point out.

After the 90-day trial period is over, companies have to pay for support on the Ingres and Red Hat software, unless they prefer to support the code themselves.

While Red Hat is obviously very interested and motivated in getting its RHEL underneath the Ingres Development Stack for JBoss, the stack is certified to run on Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as well as Canonical's Ubuntu Linux.

Ingres 9.2 runs on a wide variety of platforms, including MS Windows, OpenVMS, Sun's Solaris, IBM's AIX and HP-UX.

Woods even added that although Windows is still the dominant platform for app developers working with Ingres databases, Linux is rapidly getting some traction. And when it comes to production environments for Ingres, Windows simply doesn't have as high a share of the platform count, while Unix systems generally have a much bigger share of the market.

But in production environments, Ingres is seeing a lot of customers moving to Windows or Linux platforms, just like every other software maker.

Since many application developers work with Windows, a similar bundle that includes Ingres 9.2, JBoss middleware and Eclipse-based development tools tuned to run on Windows already exists.

Overall, Ingres is viewed by some as one of the main foundations of the relational database market, and Ingres says that it has more than 10,000 customers in over 54 countries using its database product as of March 31, 2009.

However, installed base numbers weren't provided, but considering that Computer Associates took the Ingres database open source in Ocrober 2004 (before it spun Ingres out as a separate company in 2005) the Ingres base could be even a bit larger than the customer count.

Source: Ingres & Red Hat.

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