Has the momentum of open-source products slowed due to the dual-licensing model implemented by the major database vendors? I really don't see that at all. Customers started experimenting with open-source databases because they were successful with Linux and Apache Web server. And they recognized that their license fees weren't driving new product development. They desperately wanted the open-source business model. But the open-source databases are immature. They haven't gone through a 30-year maturation process like Oracle and DB2. In the long run, you may see some temporary wins [by vendors of proprietary databases distributing free editions] for those users who are making pure price decisions. But I think you're going to see more people driving towards [an] open-source business model, [which makes] it more efficient for new database features to be delivered to the market. For the leading-edge customers who still need new features, there are ways to get such features much quicker than paying license fees to closed-source vendors. When you want a change in a closed-source product, you have to lobby the vendor like you would lobby Congress.
Can open-source companies keep up with the much larger development operations of proprietary database vendors? Some Wall Street companies told us that they have lobbied Oracle for 10 years to add certain new features. So it's not just who has the capacity, but who has the willingness to do it. And while Oracle or IBM may appear to have more developers, the fact is the number of people actually touching the kernel is very small, usually about a dozen or so.
As a veteran of the database wars, can Ingres generate the buzz that surrounds new open-source databases like MySQL? I think that's kind of naive. It's not the way the development organizations or CIOs I've worked with make decisions. Developers make decisions based on what is the best tool for a specific task. Standards bodies within organizations then make their decisions on what is going to be the easiest to deploy, support and maintain. MySQL's popularity is at its level because it is the easiest tool [with which] to deploy Web-based applications, and it came along at a time when Web applications exploded in popularity. It wasn't the "cool factor," it was because MySQL was easy to use. When you talk to an enterprise DBA, they don't care about the coolness or how fast you can develop a Web app with it; they care about stability, about whether they're going to have to come back in at 2 a.m. to recover a corrupted file.
Has Ingres gained any new customers since spinning off from CA four months ago? The deals we have closed -- and we have closed many deals -- have all been expansions within existing customers. I don't know that we've closed any brand-new customers. We've concentrated on communicating with our existing customers, making sure they're satisfied. We believe that new customers will come as a natural course.
Has the new Ingres formulated a product development road map? On Feb. 7, we released Ingres 2006, which has a new licensing, packaging and pricing model. We will also have a product coming out in the first half of 2007. We're doing things that are subtle changes to major features we already have.