Last week I was at GOSCON and had the opportunity to hear David Wennergren, Dep Asst SEc of Defense for Information Managmeent and Technology/ Deputy Chief Information Officer speak.  Mr. Wennergren was the author for the DOD memorandum and he talked about the advantages of open source.

It was great to hear someone in the federal space talk about open source and I wanted to share some of his thoughts around on open source:

• By sharing information openly, teams are able to work more efficeintly and effectively. Ideas build on other ideas and so goes the trend.
• Quick and inexpensive means to deploy your application and assess your progress in real time.
• Future must look like iphone apps – Where users can quickly find what they need or develop it themselves. Must be easy to plug into.
• Secure Information Sharing – These two things must be managed together.
• Power of the Cloud – ‘Server huggers’ must move past control and trust. The world doesn’t work in silos anymore.

These ideas aren’t new to the open source world but to hear them spoken and accepted in such a forum was great news.  The time is right for open source and it looks like the US Government is helping lead the way.

/deb

It’s great to see open source solutions get more visibility especially in our government and what better place to start than at the White House. 

/deb

Other academic project Ingres has participated  include Ingres Vectorwise, open source bootcamps (FOSSLC),  alliances and guest lectures at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ilmenau University in Germany, NC State University in the US, Warwick University& Leeds Met University in the UK are just some of the universities we enjoy working with.

Another interesting group working is Open Source for America, they have a working group that Ingres participates is working with to help educators get more involved with open source.

We find when we work with the various universities not only are sharing knowledge but gaining tremendous insight into our products and future solutions as well. We get the opportunity to work with bright individuals that don’t have preconceived ideas and they  just want to write better code. It’s a win win for all.

I always enjoy hearing how other open source members are working with local universities and would enjoy to hear what is going on with your local community. Let us how your project is engaging with students and ideas you may have to help academia communities get more involved with open source.

There’s lots of ways to get involved, so pick one that meets your needs and get started.

/deb

Once the users got together, lots of discussion around which features to focus on and how to get code submitted upstream. Lots of opinions were shared with a great outcome of useful features for a number of users. Key features such as creating a prototype that allows 4GL developers to customize the frame editor, research around the Intellisense editor, and work on creating time stamps to help with debugging of code .

What was truly unique about this code sprint was how the users came together to put the event together. The users coordinated this event across multiple timezones utilizing the community wiki to discuss potential topics for the sprint. These guys even pulled together templates for how to host a code sprint for other users interested in putting together a code sprint in their region. We at Ingres would be glad to help out as well.Great work guys.

/deb

Ingres 9.3 has implemented a number of key features that will help assist application developers with the migration. Ingres 9.3 offers support for:

• Like for Long Objects to facilitate porting FOSS applications
• Identity columns
• Named results
• Extended .Net support
• One click configuration support for common workloads
• Liferay application support
• Support for table procedures

This isn’t a complete list of features that will aid developers in the seamless migration from other databases but is a good sampling to pique interest. The full list can be found on the Ingres products page.  There is a webinar that walks through the various features with Christine Normile, Sr. Product Mgr for Ingres listed on the Ingres On Demand Webinar site.

If you are new to Ingres there also is a great selection of on demand webinars to help you get started. Topics includes Getting started with Ingres, Ingres for Oracle users, How to manage Ingres, How to backup your data and How to import your data are just a sampling to get you started.

Check out the download and let us know what you think.

/deb

Open source solutions are helping customers globally find ways to save money day after day. There was an interesting blog this week from Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols where he points out how open source companies are seeing growth despite today’s economy.  Examples he shared discussed  Red Hat’s growth of 15% up from the previous year and Novell’s Linux growth of 22% from the previous quarters. However not all software vendors are seeing this success, proprietary vendors such as Microsoft with 17% decline year over year and Sun  with 37% declines in the 2nd Quarter.  Looks like the price increases proprietary vendors were putting in place earlier this year and last fall haven’t quite panned out.

With all the focus on more people looking to save money, it’s no suprise that open source is getting a piece of the action.

/deb

/deb

Seems everyone is looking for ways to save costs and we at Ingres think we have found a way to help customers do just that. We started out building software appliances, Ingres Icebreaker, where we combined the Ingres database with the linux operating system in a single install. We then added a BI suite of tools, Ingres Icebreaker BI Appliance with Jaspersoft and continued with building an Ingres Icebreaker ECM Appliance with Alfresco. It’s been a successful project as we see new customers and partner take on this idea as well. Recently we joined the Novell Suse Studio and this idea of bundles and appliances seems to resonate well customers looking to save some cash.

We have also found that not everyone wants an appliance footprint, but the idea of offering bundles is a nice alternative to have  a single point of contact for the solution.  This sometimes causes some angst with the support team, but our guys here at Ingres are up for the challenge and love the opportunity to work with customers to help them save money. I guess open source is about sharing and bringing value to the table.

I would be interested in ideas you are seeing to help customers save money in this trying times.

/deb

The talk covered a number of topics and allowed the various member companies to express their ideas around how they are seeing growth in the market place around open source, government interest with open source, various license strategies and how the respective companies have monetized open source. There was also some discussion about the recent formation of the Open Source for America organization . This group is barely a month old and already boasting over 1200 members and they are getting quite a bit of traction in getting open source attention in the US Government. The OSA has done a good job in helping get the message out about open source solutions and provides a great foundation for the member companies to work together to build solutions. Several members of the OSA (Nick Hasley from Jaspersoft, Eric Soares from Ingres)  will be at the Open World Forum in Paris in October 1-2. If you happen to be at the event, stop by and catch their talk.

It’s great to see such active groups out there such as the Open Solutions Alliance and the Open Source for America helping get the message about open source in the market place. If you haven’t already, check these groups out to see how you can get involved and take a listen to the podcast.

Opening keynotes by Jim Whitehurst and Paul Cormier were very well attended and offered quite a bit of insight around what the conference will offer. Paul gave a great history of how proprietary vendors continue to try and lock in various levels of the stack and how Red Hat is able to find ways to continue to provide customers and partners with choices.

Every day the Red Hat team pulls together a newspaper highlighting the previous days events and what to watch up. Ingres’ own, Chris Hane, Director Engineering got a chance to show off his Rockband skills last night.

The traffic here has been great, with 1500 or so attendees there is a topic that everyone is interested in. I just finished watching Craig Muzilla’s keynote on JBoss where he shared some interesting recent customer wins from CME, Geico, etc. There is alot of interest being driven around JBoss and here at Ingres we are excited to have an application development bundle around JBoss as well. Customers are looking for more cost effective ways to develop their applications and JBoss certainly makes sense.

The Ingres booth is focused on helping users save costs while delivering enterprise solutions.  If you are here at the show – stop on by and share your stories with us.