New York-based Ingres began working on the potential for application-specific appliances following the launch of its Icebreaker database appliance late last year. The tie-up with JasperSoft is just the first of many, according to president and chief operations officer, Roger Burkhardt.
Our first foray is something we’ve just finished development on with JasperSoft, it’s in customer’s hands now, he told Computer Business Review, noting that the two companies were aiming for general availability in July.
The new appliance will include the range of JasperSoft’s open source software, including reporting, analysis, and ETL functionality, built on Ingres’s database functionality and an embedded Linux kernel.
It will use a single installation, and have a single maintenance stream and support structure, with Ingres acting as the face to the customer, and the two companies working behind the scenes on support issues.
As a result we are providing an enterprise support structure and driving more revenue for us, and more revenue for JasperSoft, said Burkhardt. The BI appliance is the first of many Ingres is planning, and talks and technical integration work are under way with open source content management firm Alfresco, Burkhardt added.
While the JasperSoft appliance is being taken to market by Ingres it is also interested in working with partners to enable them to come up with new products to take to market, said Burkhardt, revealing that one of the company’s Indian systems integrator partners is building a set of specialized business intelligence appliances that meet departmental needs, starting with the IT department and then focusing on areas such as finance.
In recent months Ingres has entered into partnerships with Wipro, Satyam, and Cognizant as it tries to make the most of their rapid growth. As the former CTO of the New York Stock Exchange, he said Burkhardt has seen the opportunity those provides represent.
I adopted an offshore model at the Stock Exchange and have seen the value, he said, noting that the use of open source also provides value for the likes of Wipro as they try to change their model from low-cost development. They’re looking to have more of an IP-based business and as they do that they love open source, he said. The work they are doing ranges from doing Ingres work to taking their IP and putting it on Ingres.
As an example of the latter he cited Wipro’s Flow-briX business process management framework, which is based on the expertise it has developed in process management and is supported on Ingres.
As well as services companies and open source software vendors, Ingres is also keen on building its relationships with proprietary software vendors, where Burkhardt believes the company’s independence provides it with opportunities.
There are large existing software companies that want to partner with a large database provider that is not competing with them, said Burkhardt, citing Business Objects’s decision to make its Business Objects Crystal Decisions Professional edition software for small and medium businesses available on Ingres as well as Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, and Oracle.
We are not going to become a business intelligence company, he said. I would say there’s a similar motivation with BEA [which partnered with Ingres a year ago]. There is a strong growth vector for our business from being a neutral player.
If software vendors are going to pick an open source database offering to support alongside the usual suspects, then Burkhardt said the company’s history within CA and the backing of investment firm Garnett & Helfrich Capital give sit an edge.
A number of these players tried to work with open source databases before Ingres came on the scene but there wasn’t enough there to get the traction they wanted. he said. Business Objects need to have a database they can sell a significant product around and that’s what Ingres brings to the table.
