Open Source Ingrained in Ingres

Roger Burkhardt, an Oxford educated, technically savvy Brit, is leading the US software company Ingres. I learned about Ingres when I was attending university. They had developed one of the first relational databases. At that time its use was confined to labs and not yet ready for prime time. Subsequently Ingres became widely adopted and thousands of customers used the database products for their applications. Computer Associates acquired Ingres in 1995. The company was subsequently relaunched as an open source company in 2006. Roger took over as CEO, after a 6 year stint as Chief Technology Office of the New York Stock Exchange.

He comments: “Most concepts that are fine in theory don’t work in practice. With open source it is the other way around. It goes against all organizational principles, but turns out to be highly effective”. He and his team have developed a network of thousands of users, developers and contributors. They created a lively community committed to keep the Ingres products at the forefront of technology. The business model has evolved from a traditional licensing model, which aims to lock in clients and have them charge for annual maintenance fees, to one of implementation, optimization and support. Ingres technology is freely available as a download and the company makes money selling a support subscription to users who are running mission critical workloads.

Roger is particularly excited about “Open Innovation”. They started working with the Amsterdam-based on Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science) on the next generation of database servers. Their starting point was that the architecture of database software was based on the 20 year old technology and that the explosion of stored data with its 50-100% annual growth required fresh thinking. CWI and Ingres invited a community of scientists to work on a project dubbed “Vectorwise Computing”. In essence they redesigned the software to take advantage of the very large number of transistors packed on today’s Intel chips and to resolve the fact that memory has become a major bottleneck. The global team, of which many members have never met face-to-face, is led by two of Ingres top engineers and two of CWI scientists as well as leading researchers from around the world. Ingres ensures that the end result is a commercially viable product, available to the development community as open source.

For their internal technology needs, Roger decided to move away from in-house developed, managed and operated systems. He felt that the company needed a flexible application base that would allow them to rapidly integrate the acquisitions they had planned and be able to scale with the volume of business. His direction was to use “Software as a Service”, where viable. The obvious advantages of this approach are short implementation cycles, flexible cost with low upfront investment and minimal operational management. The potential downside is lock-in and dependency on the provider. He is increasingly looking for open source software that runs in the Cloud, to get the benefits of the service and avoid the risks of vendor dependency. Currently his core business applications are obtained as a service from Salesforce.com and Intact for ERP.

Since Roger has actively lived the tremendous innovation and opportunities spawned by the open standards and open source movement in the Internet space, he is a staunch believer in applying the same concepts to one of the biggest issues facing us: global warming. He is working with a number of organizations to accelerate the speed of innovation in green technology.

Open Source is becoming a phenomenon that extends well beyond software. Its collaboration model with large groups of people around the globe contributing on the Internet to common solutions, is making inroads in education, healthcare and now green technology. The organizations that know how to tap into these opportunities by leveraging web tools and engaging key stakeholders will set themselves apart.