Ingres partners with BEA on open source

Open source database vendor aligns with middleware player to promote developer tools

Open-source relational data-base player Ingres has signed up middleware vendor BEA Systems as its first ISV (independent software vendor) partner.

The first stage in the partnership sees BEA adding support for the Ingres 2006 database to its Workshop Studio 3.1 developer tools suite for the open-source Eclipse environment.

By teaming up, Ingres and BEA hope to provide an open-source offering for developers looking to build a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

The companies are also looking for a way to better compete with Oracle and IBM.

BEA has certified Ingres 2006 for Workshop Studio, so that the two products work well together, and has designed Workshop Studio 3.1 to automatically recognise the Ingres database. So far, BEA lacks a similar relationship with any other database vendor when it comes to product certification, says Pieter Humphrey, senior product marketing manager at BEA.

BEA and Ingres have been working together for about three months on the integration and optimisation of their products, says Emma McGrattan, senior vice president of engineering at Ingres.

She and Humphrey say their companies are looking for additional opportunities to integrate their respective software. “Some of the managers at BEA are former CA executives,” Humphrey says. “There’s a nice synergy between the organisations.” Ingres was spun out from CA last November.

BEA and Ingres have a similar take on open-source software, Humphrey says. BEA’s talk of “blended open source” — the bringing together of open-source and commercially supported software — dovetails with Ingres’ similar definition of its tag-line, “business open source”.

Ingres is also on track to release a prototype of its software appliance to customers, probably in July, McGrattan says. The appliance will tightly integrate the Ingres database with a distribution of Linux.