CA Spins Out Open Source Ingres Database

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

A year ago, after a massive management shakeup that saw the ouster of the top executives of the company, Computer Associates decided to take its Ingres relational database to an open source development and licensing model. The initial story back then was somewhat skeptical, because the database market had changed so much in the decade that CA had control of Ingres and it got lost in the noise about DB2, Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, and MySQL database.

Only a few weeks after Ingres went open source as the Ingres r3 database, CA hired John Swainson, the top middleware executive at IBM's Software Group, to be its president and CEO-designate. And in April of this year, he took the reins of the company and began the job of paring down CA's huge portfolio of applications and middleware and getting it focused on two core competencies--systems management and security. So it was not really much of a surprise this week when CA announced that a venture capitalist with lots of experience in doing buyouts of high tech companies had acquired the Ingres business from CA and immediately set about to create a company dedicated to the further open source development of the Ingres database and using a paid-for support business model that is common among commercial open source software these days.

A Little Bit of History

The Ingres database is almost as old as the commercial data processing market--back then, it was called data processing, not information technology--and it is certainly no stranger to the open source movement. In fact, Ingres is one of the oldest open source projects in the world and was one of the early relational databases, which in this case came out of a research project at the University of California at Berkeley. This is also where the Berkeley Systems Design, or BSD, variant of Unix that is at the heart of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Sun Microsystems' Solaris Unix variant, all stem from. The open source version of Ingres was widely known as University Ingres or Berkeley Ingres, and a company called ASK Computer Group commercialized Ingres as a real, production-level database. In 1994, as the Unix operating system was taking off as an enterprise platform, CA paid $310 million to acquire ASK. CA needed a Unix database to sell alongside its IDMS mainframe database, and there is no way that porting IDMS to Unix made any sense.

ASK was not the only company to commercialize code from the Ingres project, which was released under the BSD license. Sybase (and therefore Microsoft's SQL Server), Informix, Tandem's NonStop SQL (for fault tolerant machines) are all derivatives of Ingres. (The people who worked on the original Ingres project founded Sybase, Ingres Corporation, which was later eaten by ASK, and Tandem, in fact.) And the kicker Berkeley project to Ingres, jokingly called PostgreSQL, is today a popular open source relational database, too. The open-sourcing of Ingres has already created a huge wave of innovation for the past 25 years. The question now is can the re-opening of Ingres and the spinning out of the product make it a viable alternative to the MySQL and PostgreSQL open source databases as well as Oracle's 10g, IBM's DB2, Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 (just launched this week), and Sybase's Adaptive Server Enterprise 15 (just announced a few weeks ago).

The New Ingres

The venture capitalists who bought Ingres from CA and formed the new Ingres Corporation clearly believe that the answer to that question is: "Yes."

Garnett & Helfrich Capital is the new owner of the Ingres product line. Garnett & Helfrich is a venture buyout fund that was formed in 2003 and funded by institutional investors in March 2004 to buy up medium-sized tech companies and turn them around with a war chest of more than $250 million,. Neither CA nor Garnett & Helfrich would say how much money the venture capitalists paid for Ingres, nor would Garnett & Helfrich divulge how big its war chest is today. Terry Garnett is one of the two founders of the venture fund and has funded a bunch of Silicon Valley startups, including Crossworlds Software, which was founded by his wife, Katrina Garnett, and sold to IBM in 2001. Garnett, the husband, is now chairman and interim CEO for Ingres, the company. Emma McGrattan, who has been a senior database developer at ASK and then CA, is vice president of engineering at the new company, and she is leaving CA to take that role on. She will run development teams in California, New York, and London. Ingres has brought in Dave Dargo, an open source consultant who spent 15 years at Oracle and who set up its Linux development programs before leaving that database maker, haws been named senior vice president of strategy and the Ingres chief technology officer. Dev Mukherjee, who used to be marketing manager for Microsoft's Windows Server System operating system and middleware stack, is chief marketing officer and senior vice president of business development at Ingres; he is also well-known for coining the term "On Demand" while working at IBM's Global Services unit. Andy Allbritten, who used to handle customer support at PeopleSoft, is the senior vice president of support and services at Ingres. This seems to be a very serious lineup of software executive talent.

While there are a lot of skeptics about whether or not Ingres, with only 5,000 customers worldwide, can compete against open source alternatives like MySQL that have millions of users and database giants like IBM and Oracle, which have very deep pockets and huge installed bases, Ingres is quite serious about making money. You can tell by the executive lineup and by the fact that venture capitalists expect a big return on their investments. CA has retained an investment in Ingres, and has added Mark Barrenechea to the board of directors at Ingres. This is, by the way, Garnett & Helfrich's second big deal, the first being taking out a $35 million controlling stake in thin client maker Wyse Technology earlier this year.

The main issue that the new Ingres faces is the license for the open source project. CA released Ingres r3 under its own license, which was called the CA Trusted Open Source License. This license, which is a derivative of the Common Public License, allows software developers to embed Ingres r3 into their products and to distribute it freely so long as they make the Ingres source code available as part of their solution. The less obvious and historically satisfying licensing model that Ingres could adopt is the BSD license, which is a much more liberal license than the GNU General Public License that many open source projects adopt. Of course, the very openness of the BSD license is what helped competitors to ASK create products to compete against ASK with, so open source cuts both ways. Whatever the new Ingres does, it plans to make up its mind on a license by the end of the year.

Now that Ingres is free again, it might be the perfect time for Sun to deeply embed Ingres into Solaris to create a highly integrated database for its own Unix variant. Something like IBM has done with its iSeries OS/400-DB2 servers and that Digital Equipment did with the rdb database on VMS and HP did with the embedded database on MPE. Solaris and Ingres might be a powerful combination--and both are now open source.

The open source Ingres r3 is available on HP-UX 11i, AIX 5L, Linux 2.4 and 2.6 on X86, X64, and Itanium, Windows 2000, 2003, and XP on 32-bit X86, Solaris 8, 9, and 10 on Opteron and Sparc, and SCO OpenServer 6 and UnixWare 7.1.3 and 7.1.4.

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