There’s a joke doing the rounds at the moment: Ingres’ UK subsidiary is a sales and marketing operation. That is the joke. But as the proverb has it, he who laughs last, laughs longest. The new UK managing director for the Ask Ingres division Mike Hedger is determined to make marketing a verb that does not provoke a titter when used in conjunction with Ingres. As he puts it even Rolls Royce now has to advertise. He readily admits that the Ingres fatal flaw in its operations so far has been its lack of entrepreneurial application. The corporate ethic has grown up within the company that the product speaks for itself and that is enough.
Ingres pitch
However those that have witnessed the rise and rise of Oracle Corp’s Oracle know that while it helps to have a product that works, a well-known brand name and image can work wonders. Hedger was recruited for Ingres by Hugh McCartney who is widely respected in the industry for turning the Ingres UK operation into a tight, profitable business. Hedger is anxious to assure people that within Europe the Ingres pitch is unchanged by the fact that it is now owned by Ask Computer Systems Inc. This assurance is lent credibility by the fact that at senior vice-president level Ingres has the upper hand in that Mike Laven who was previously vice-president of continental Europe for Ingres is now vice-president of European operations for Ask Europe, which includes Ingres and the Application Products division. The situation in the US is less clear, however, since Ask is much stronger in the US market than in Europe and the Ingres US strength lies in the manufacturing sector. In the UK Ingres and Ask are being run as separate entities, on the continent the two operations are being merged together under the aegis of an Ingres man, but in the US the strategy is still being formulated as to whether to merge the two organisations together or not. In the UK Hedger says that Ingres has three equally sized businesses in the government, financial and commercial sectors. Despite the fact that allresearch and development for Ingres continues at Alameda, California, Hedger refutes the suggestion that this means Ingres will become a manufacturing software company. This is because such a suggestion assumes that Ask will only stay in the manufacturing systems world and it is apparently not safe to make such an assumption.
– By Katy Ring-
Indeed, the financial and accounting modules of the soon-to-be-released Advance package are not designed specifically for the manufacturing sector and are appropriate for other application areas. The one irredeemably good news for Ingres as regards its acquisition by Ask is that it is in a strong cash-positive position and is, Hedger claims, stronger from a financial point of view any other database supplier. So far so good, however, there is one quirky thing about Ingres from the point of view of those thatwatch the database market: if something happens to Ingres a web of relationships gets disturbed with interesting political consequences. To start with there is Hewlett-Packard Co with its 10% stake in Ask Computer Systems Inc – where does this stake take its relationship with Ingres? Hewlett does not have an executive involvement on the Ask board, and Hedger claims that Hewlett-Packard’s involvement with Ask Ingres was simply a strategic investment made to support open systems and not in any way a directional investment. Nevertheless, Ask’s Peter West was quite convinced that Ask Ingres was to help Hewlett-Packard ManMan users migrate to new applications (CI No 1,513). Hedger is coy about whether this means that Advance will be the preferred migration route from ManMan, saying only that Hewlett-Packard and Ask sell a lot of products jointly. He declined to comment on whether Ingres will collaborate with Hewlett-Packard on development of a data dictionary for AllBase SQL. However, it would be very naive to imagine that Hewlett and Ingres are not getting closer, and similarly it would be downright stupid to believe that there will be no change in DEC’s attitude tow
ards Ingres. At present DEC sells Ingres as Ultrix SQL, the preferred database for its Ultrix machines, but it is almost an open secret that DEC is working very hard behind the scenes to get itself in a position where it no longer relies on Ingres. Hedger believes that DEC has a very difficult task on its hands to get a version of Rdb running in both its VAX and Ultrix environments and thinks that the fruits of this development won’t appear for at least three years – optimists at DEC say a product will come to market at the beginning of 1992.
Disingenuous
Furthermore, Ingres has quite a hold on the VAX market and derives around half its revenue from sales in the VMS environment, so in a sense it doesn’t lose a great deal if DEC reviews the status of Ultrix SQL. Hedger is quite calm about his company’s prospects in a database market that may well see keener competition from the likes of IBM and DEC in the next few years. He says that it has always been the intention of hardware vendors to own the database management system, but he thinks that Ingres can withstand the onslaught because he claims that its technology is 12 to 18 months ahead of anybody else’s as version 6.0 was totally rearchitected offering object manager and knowledge manager, while its toolset and applications are independent of the database. This answer could be a little disingenuous, since it seems increasingly likely that aside from a closer relationship with Hewlett-Packard, Ingres is likely to be the preferred database for the DS/90 – Fujitsu Ltd’s name for ICL’s DRS/6000 range that it is now marketing in North America, Australia, Asia and Spain. As for the future, Hedger says that he is cautiously optimistic, not overly bullish but pretty positive. Despite such caution the last laugh could well be his.
