Computer Associates International has pledged its allegiance to the open source community. The company, based in Islandia, N.Y., has created a new strategy around open source development, is about to release a totally open version of the Ingres Enterprise Relational Database and forged partnerships
with several software developers for open source projects.
Ingres, which stands for INteractive Graphics and REtrieval System, came to life as a project led by Michael Stonebraker at the University of California at Berkley in 1972. This September CA will deliver an open sourced version of Ingres under the CA Trusted Open Source License.
Sam Greenblatt, senior vice president and chief architect for the Linux Technology Group at CA dismisses the notion that Ingres has been a dormant brand for CA. He said that in the past ten years Ingres users have grown between 25,000 to 50,000 and the database is currently being used by the Irish government.
“”Ingres is not a dormant brand by any stretch,”” he said.
Also part of the Linux plan will be Brightstor Document Manager.
Greenblatt added that people would begin to build applications around Ingres for Linux whereas before they would use other databases.
“”Before there wasn’t any open source database and now we have an open source database that will replace Postgres and MySQL,”” Greenblatt said.
CA will be rolling the Ingres for Linux out to the channel. They will also be targeting current Ingres integrators as well.
Greenblatt envision Ingres and a market opportunity for system integrators because the database is more robust that other Linux-based systems such as Postgres, which came out of the Ingres development and MySQL.
The adoption of Linux is expected to increase even further in the future according to two market analyst firms. IDC anticipates that Linux will grow from its 2002 market share of 4.6 percent to 16.1 per cent by the end of 2007. A Forrester study reports that 72 per cent of IT executives of $1 billion or larger companies plan to increase their investments in Linux.
CA also announced a slew of open source projects and have partnered with Jboss Inc. Zope Inc., two prominent members of the open source community.
The company will also develop a new KGEM kernel facility that will enable management applications to work with Linux in a standard way. An open source management stack consisting of Ingres, Java, Python and Linux will also be part of the mix.
Finally CA will help to further the Plone Foundation, which helps accelerate the growth and maturation of Plone technology.
According to Greenblatt, Plone is a document management system used by such high profile organizations such as NASA and marketing communications company Porter Novelli.
