I don't know if it's buzz around the SUN/MySQL deal, but I stumbled upon Ingres again recently. Computer Associates spun off the Ingres business a couple years ago with an investment from Garnett & Helfrich Capital. They did $50m in revenue last year. MySQL only did $20m, so it's worth keeping an eye on Ingres. Of course, MySQL has many more users, probably because MySQL is much easier to get on whatever platform you're on. I'd expect MySQL to be available any given Web host. I wouldn't be surprised to find PostgreSQL being offered, but I'd be puzzled to see Ingres offered. That is, until I read up on them recently.

Ingres has a familiar business model: give away the source code and charge for support. Of course, there's the "community" edition and the "Commercial" edition of the product. That's the same thing we see from Zimbra, SugarCRM and KnowledgeTree. Ultimately there's some sort of connector to Windows included in the commercial version, but that doesn't appear to be the case with Ingres. They call out on their datasheet that there's nothing different between the free version and the supported version. You just get support.

I appreciate that. It kind of bugs me to know there's some extra feature I might find useful if only I shelled out $5K. The Ingres folks seem to be oriented on open source first and secondly figuring out how to make the money work. And like I said, the money part is certainly working for them. They even plan to IPO later this year.

Ingres is using the tried-and-true marketing technique of coining a new term that really doesn't have much extra meaning, but it does help us all get the message across in the elevator. Their term is "Business Open Source". It's meant to be open source software that's compatible with enterprise business. They spell this out in a white paper called Ingres Business Open Source — Rising to the open source challenge. It starts from ground zero, which is good. Anyone who already knows what open source is, doesn't need to be convinced it's better than closed source software.

I like that they cover in two pages the biggest advantages of open source. These are terms that any IT manager can understand and they are free of the kind of posturing you might read on Slashdot. The theme here is that open source projects faced the dual challenges of not having a company standing behind them and they didn't have a long track record. It's a bit of hyperbole, and it's certainly not true that Ingres Corporation revolutionized anything by introducing the term Business Open Source. These guys spun off of CA in 2005.

This kind of bragging and fudging of the facts turns me off, but it can't trump the usefulness of the product. Form ought to function. I can't deny that this kind of text is the comfort an IT manager at a more conservative firm likes to have. The real appeal is the plain facts: lower cost of acquisition, transparency, shared risk, proven technology, available support and only the features you need.