Ingres Q3 2010 Highlights
- Launches version 10
- The acquisition of Sun by Oracle enhances its Open Source credentials
- Has a lower-cost approach encapsulated in its New Economics of IT strategy
- Is a small supplier with interesting government accounts
- Partners with TCS and Wipro
- Also eyes up the analytics market with its VectorWise software
- Is a refreshing reminder of the benefits of an Open Source approach
Oracle Buying Sun Gives Ingres Opportunities
Oracle’s acquisition of Sun is a great concern to the Open Source developer community, so we took up an opportunity to talk to Ketan Karia, SVP of Marketing at Ingres this week about their own offerings and the development of Open Source software in general. By happy coincidence (believe it or not) I’m writing this post on the day Ingres launches version 10 of its database.
We believe Open Source development has been under increasing pressure as the speed of innovation cools and vendors become increasingly vertically integrated. We’ve shown a diagram of the five development stacks for enterprise and database development in Figure 1, which is based on Ingres’s own chart. We noticed that this pictogram is was similar to the Web Hosting/Cloud Computing Ecosystem pictured by AMD when discussing the three stacks there. While the Microsoft and Sun/Java stacks are essentially the same, Ingres was missing from AMD’s view and clearly the Redhat/Ingres stack is currently different from the ‘lamp’ ecosystem. It will be interesting to see whether these converge over time.
In the case of Oracle Ketan mentioned a number of issues of changes and uncertainties in the Sun stack. In particular he believes that MySQL’s new owner has hiked up the support costs. We’ve seen Oracle change the position of OpenSolaris, not least because server vendors such as IBM and HP supported its use as part of a step process to take over Sun accounts. Sun’s (clearly unsuccessful) strategy was to give important software away in order to do future business on support – Oracle is a different beast.
Oracle continues to provide free downloads of MySQL and in fact Ketan indicated that Ingres has seen no great upsurge in downloads of its own free database yet. He believes however that Ingres’s lower support costs will persuade organisations to move from MySQL to Ingres 10.
Government Customers And Indian Partners
Ingres reports that its own business is profitable, better than most start-up companies and that it has now had three sequential quarters on plan. The company has over 14k customers. Its latest reference clients include:
- The Indian Institute of Technology
- The State of Bengal and Gujrat
- Dai Rubicon (which deploys Ingres in the Cloud)
- The governments of Jordan and Hungary (both of which have decided to make Ingres ‘the database of choice’)
- Peerless (a major Australian food retailer).
We believe Ingres is also used in government accounts such as the Irish Revenue Service, the UK’s Office of National Statistics and in Barclays Bank’s branch office network.
Its partners include the Indian software development companies Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services (which is driving the adoption of Ingres in the State of Bengal account mentioned above among others), Solnet, base2 services and Netinfo. It is also going through a major recruitment drive.
Ingres’s lower-cost approach is encapsulated in its ‘New Economics of IT’ strategy, which is an interesting counter measure to the increasing integration and costs of major system vendors’ approaches. By the way the 1980s showed that many users grow to dislike vendor lock-in not necessarily because of higher costs, but because they couldn’t unbundle component pricing and suspected the costs are higher.
Ingres also has some very interesting analytics software, VectorWise, which reportedly has stunning performance and much lower costs than the established vendors.
Some Conclusions – Ingres Is A Breath Of Fresh Air For The Open Source Community
We’ve known Ingres for years – since before it was acquired by CA and subsequently offloaded. Our discussions were the first for a long time that centred on the benefits of an Open Source approach to software development. It is a small company with some interesting products. It also allows users to download its product for free of course. The difference is that it appears to take a more reasonable approach to pricing, which makes it more attractive if Oracle and others are increasing the support charges for the Open Source software they acquire.
We intend to investigate the technical issues of shifting to Ingres from MySQL, which will limit its appeal if difficult of course. On the face of things it would be prudent for Open Source enterprise and database software developers to investigate its products if they don’t already know them. It is countering the increased integration of its competitors, making it more attractive as a supplier. Let’s just hope it isn’t acquired any time soon.
Are you an Ingres user? How do you compare its database with MySQL? As always please let us know your experiences by commenting on this post.
Ingres is clearly established as a business-critical DBMS, which makes it just about the only open source DBMS for systems that can’t ever be allowed to fail (banking, government, etc.). What is less clear is that it is well-suited to applications that merely find SQL a convenient way to access short-lived low-value content–applications where we might once have used a file system instead. For these applications one needs minimal overhead, with the bare minimum of SQL, and minimal consistency control. Release 10 expands Ingres’ reach in both directions.
Roy – many thanks for the insight. Would that also explain why MySQL is better suited to Cloud development?