BEA was the first member of Ingres’s Involve partnership program in June 2006, bundling Ingres’s JDBC driver into BEA Workshop Studio 3.1, BEA’s development tool. The two companies have been working together ever since and have now formalized the relationship.
Speaking to Computer Business Review, Ingres’s recently promoted CEO, Roger Burkhardt, said that while the certification did not mean a change in the relationship between Ingres and BEA it was important in giving customers peace of mind. For prospective customers, they want to know that both companies will support the combination, he said, noting that it also gave additional confidence to existing customers that the partnership is long-term.
With regard to development projects, Burkhardt said the companies are working together on real-time and complex event-processing environments that need a reliable data store, as well as virtualization and appliances.
He said there are a number of potential areas to explore with regard to the latter opportunity and that no definite plans are in place at the moment. Ingres has been focused on the opportunity for database appliances since the launch if its Icebreaker product in March 2007, while earlier this month it shipped a BI Appliance in conjunction with JasperSoft.
BEA meanwhile has been working on virtualization and appliance opportunities since the launch of its Project Bare Metal technology in late 2006, including Liquid VM, a naked VM that will support Java SE applications or open source containers like Spring, Hibernate, or Tomcat.
Burkhardt joined Ingres as president and COO in July 2006 and became CEO (changing a vowel as he put it) in August this year as chairman Terry Garnett relinquished the role to focus on his main role as partner with private equity firm Garnett & Helfrich Capital.
Burkhardt said his promotion to the role of CEO had always been the plan, and said his former role as chief technology officer of the New York Stock Exchange put him in a good position to ensure the company stays true to its customers.
One of the things about open source is that it puts the customer back in charge, and having a customer at the head of the company is one way of ensuring that remains the case, he said.
