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Is Ingres leading an open source 'apps stack'?
Mike Davis
Is Ingres leading an open source 'apps stack'?
With the announcement of an ECM appliance barely a year after its declaration of an integrated business intelligence (BI) solution, open source database vendor Ingres appears to be creating, through partnerships, an alternative 'one-stop shop' for enterprise applications. While the likes of IBM and Oracle may not have to worry yet, given these cost-conscious times, Microsoft - whose price-point is closest to open source - and smaller ISVs need to take note. Not a new application, just greater security in deployment
Ingres Icebreaker ECM Appliance utilises Alfresco's ECM technology to provide, from a single download, a pre-integrated operating system, database and ECM solution. The Ingres Icebreaker platform, which has previously been used to support a BI appliance using Jaspersoft technology, includes only the components of the Linux operating system that are necessary to allow the Ingres database to run on server hardware, and thus eliminates the need for a general-purpose operating system and all the tuning and configuration that is normally necessary when implementing a database. The real appeal for the CIO should be that, because the application is also pre-integrated, yet another step (for that read: risk/time/cost) is taken out of the deployment process. Besides being a single installation it is also a single maintenance stream, and because extraneous software has not been deployed it should require a smaller processing footprint from the server(s). The downturn should make CIOs look twice
Just as we had the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL/mSQL, PHP/Perl/etc.) technology stack for web servers, the combination of pre-integrated and tested database, BI and ECM should offer the CIO a level of confidence in that they will not be left to 'stitch the pieces of glass together' in order to get a working enterprise solution. While the high-end ECM vendors (IBM, Oracle, EMC) are still doing very nicely as financial services companies (and others) fall over themselves to deploy ECM to capture/centralise/find their information assets as they lose staff, there are by definition only 2000 in the Fortune 2000. Many smaller organisations are also looking to deploy ECM solutions for the same reasons as their larger cousins, but their IT teams will be facing exactly the same staffing pressures as the rest of the business and they may not have the financial resources to pay for the considerable services element required for the high-end solutions. Many are looking at Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) or niche ECM solutions from smaller players. Although these may be cheaper, and give the 'comfort' of being on proprietary platforms, the integration and deployment issues are just the same as at the high end. A wake-up call rather than a paradigm shift
The actual ECM product is of less importance in this announcement than the positioning of Ingres as a rival to the rest of the market, not on the open source mantra of up-front cost but on the business messages of simplicity and confidence. Of course, Oracle itself has previously been here with its Unbreakable Linux, and Microsoft and IBM have also offered simplified install products, such as their 'free to download' search offerings - SharePoint for Search Express and Omnifind Yahoo! Edition, respectively. However, these still had to be deployed on an existing operating system. The Icebreaker appliances will obviously appeal to those organisations that are already committed to Linux and open source software in general, but the reduction in risk/time/cost should make those considering proprietary ECM solutions think again.
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