Making Solutions simplier… Bundles, Appliances, etc
September 18th, 2009
The more I talk with customers and partners the more I realize how important it is to make things simple. I recently wrote an article for Open Source Magazine about the the continued growth of data in the marketplace and how to deal with it.With the economic pressures in the marketplace today, ideas that help people get at their data faster and more cost effective is at a premium.
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
