Story: CA's Ingres sell-off met with scepticism
Posted by: Anonymous (Wednesday 9 November 2005, 11:17 AM)
I work for CA, soon I'll work for Ingres Corp.
It's hardly surprising that other open source DBMS folks are 'sceptical'. Whatever they may say publically, Ingres is a real threat.
About that figure of 5,000 - saying '5,000 users' is misleading. Our site says '5,000 customers'. Note that word customer. That's 5,000 sites already paying for support. If you want to talk estimated users and downloads etc then we're talking at least an order of magnitude greater. Now that may still be 'a drop in the ocean' but it's not as insignificant as Mr Taylor would like us to believe.
If Mark Taylor thinks open source databases are outpacing Ingres then he should do a serious feature-by-feature comparison and I think he'll get a shock. There are some areas where Ingres needs development but on things like scalability, replication, parallel query, backup and recovery, manageability we're streets ahead.
I think what is true is that last year's open sourcing was a missed oportunity. It created a lot of buzz and attention but that didn't translate into real involvement with the community. The good intentions were there but in the end a lot of effort went into keeping our internal CA customers happy, as they were all busy embedding Ingres in the other CA products. And the people involved in that effort - development staff - were the same people who were needed to engage with the community. None of this is visible to the people outside CA, the person browsing the Ingres community site for the first time just sees out of date downloads, broken links and a forum where questions often go unanswered.
I think this move is good because it gives us a certain autonomy from CA, an injection of cash (expect a big marketing push soon) and will force us to focus on engaging with the open source community. It's true that we'll have to prove ourselves, but that's ok. Fundamentally we've got the best open source DBMS available and that gives us the confidence that we can make a go of this.
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