BEA adds support for Ingres 2006 database

Open-source relational database player Ingres announced Monday that it has signed up middleware company BEA Systems as its first ISV (independent software vendor) partner.

The first stage in the partnership unveiled Monday sees BEA adding support for the Ingres 2006 database to its Workshop Studio 3.1 developer tools suite for the open-source Eclipse environment.

By teaming up, Ingres and BEA hope to provide an open-source offering for developers looking to build a service-oriented architecture (SOA).

The companies are also looking for a way to better compete with Oracle and IBM, which sell databases and middleware.

BEA has certified Ingres 2006 for Workshop Studio so that the two products work well together and has designed Workshop Studio 3.1 to automatically recognize the Ingres database. So far, BEA lacks a similar relationship with any other database vendor when it comes to product certification, said Pieter Humphrey, senior product marketing manager at BEA.

BEA and Ingres have been working together for about three months on the integration and optimization of their products, according to Emma McGrattan, senior vice president of engineering at Ingres.

Both executives said their companies are looking for additional opportunities to integrate their respective software. “Some of the managers at BEA are former CA executives,” Humphrey said. “There’s a nice synergy between the organizations.” Ingres was spun out from CA in November.

BEA and Ingres have a similar take on open-source software, Humphrey said. The middleware vendor’s talk of “blended open source” — the bringing together of open-source and commercially supported software — dovetails with the database company’s similar definition of its tag line “business open source.”

In other Ingres news, the vendor remains on track to release a prototype of its software appliance to customers, probably in July, McGrattan said. The appliance will tightly integrate the Ingres database with a distribution of the Linux operating system so that the combined software can be maintained as a single unit.

Ingres is also close to announcing a permanent chief executive officer, she added.