The announcement that Ingres had been spun off from CA came a few days before CA World, and the new Ingres management team led by Terry Garnett (of Garnett & Helfrich Capital), could be seen hanging around the conference center, greeting Ingres customers and meeting with journalists and analysts (me included).Terry is acting CEO, but will stand down as soon as “the right man for the job” can be found. The new Ingres company is built from the old CA Ingres development team with a set of executives being added, some of whom are ex-Oracle. It is quite clear where Terry and his team think Ingres is going to make a living—beyond supporting the Ingres customer base, which numbers in the thousands. It is going after Oracle.

The idea is simple. A good few Oracle customers are unhappy with Oracle license fees and will happily entertain an alternative proposition. Ingres will be the alternative proposition—far less expensive and, for those who are happy to sail without a support contract, no cost at all. Ingres can claim to be enterprise ready (it is deployed already in large transactional and data warehouse systems) and currently has more credibility than MySQL or Enterprise DB as an Oracle replacement.

Can it succeed? It is difficult to predict. In my view Ingres has two opportunities;

1. To be the natural Open Source alternative to Oracle. The idea here is simply to persuade large enterprises to use Ingres in order to have a bargaining position when it comes to negotiating Oracle licenses. Few Oracle customers would contemplate a complete migration, but some might contemplate a slow migration over time, which puts pressure on Oracle pricing.
2. To be the Oracle replacement for SAP users. If Ingres gets into this position, it will prosper. Currently an estimated $500 million per year is paid to Oracle for the privilege of having the Oracle database sit under SAP. If Ingres can partner with SAP, it will help SAP and help Ingres and reduce costs.

It’s a little early to judge whether the brave new Ingres will succeed. Right now it hasn’t yet decided what its licensing scheme will be. Most likely it will be a dual licensing scheme like that of MySQL. What I am convinced about though, is that the database market will eventually flip over to being dominated by Open Source. Ingres stands a good chance of being a significant player in that move.