Ingres Partners with Red Hat to Offer Open Source Software Stacks
by Sam Dean - May. 13, 2009Comments (0)- Related Blog Posts
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In yet another move signalling the move toward cross-vendor combinations of commercial open source software, database player Ingres and Red Hat have formed a partnership, announced today. It's designed to provide combined open source software stacks for businesses. Three enterprise customers--Biveroni Batschelet Partners AG (BBP), Allied Express, and Connected Weddings--have migrated to stacks based on Ingres Database, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. According to an Ingres statement: "The combined stack gives enterprises and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) a low-cost alternative to proprietary application development." With IT spending down in this economy, and, at the same time, increased spending on open source software, these stack offerings have a lot of promise.
There have been quite a few examples recently of prominent commercial open source players joining forces to combine their applications and platforms and take the combinations out to the IT community and sales channels. We've covered the Open Source Channel Alliance, which aims to bring open source software combinations to value-added resellers and solutions providers. There are nine charter members of the OSCA, including Ingres: Alfresco, Likewise, Pentaho, EnterpriseDB, Ingres, Jaspersoft, Zenoss, Zimbra and Zmanda.
“In a world of tight IT budgets customers are taking a hard look at the unnecessary license fees that they pay to proprietary vendors of operating systems, application servers, and databases,” said Roger Burkhardt, CEO, Ingres. “Globally, IT organizations spend upwards of $10 billion each year on license fees and have found that they can cut costs and still innovate if they deploy on a full open source infrastructure stack. These enterprise customers confidently rely on Ingres and Red Hat to provide enterprise class support for their deployments.”
I'm confident that these alliances, partnerships, and combined open source software stacks will do well as IT departments remain budget constrained. They also invite responses from players not affiliated with the alliances. I've written before, for example, about how Novell and Canonical will have to answer the Open Source Channel Alliance somehow. Still, the long-term success of these partnerships depends on high-quality support from commercial open source companies, or third parties, compatibility, and many other variables.
Ingres and Red hat are both used to supporting large business and government customers, and they're also both well-known for providing excellent training. Let's see if their partnership can give Oracle, Microsoft and IBM a run for their money.
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