Why I Joined Ingres
April 14th, 2008
Came to Ingres and Opened Up Shop
One of the reasons I was excited to join Ingres is the fact that the management team was dedicated to the idea of supplying all of our business applications via Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions and everything else using open source software (OSS) solutions, including our own Ingres database. I had just gone through 2 years of painful but not uncommon downsizing effort at another company, taking IT spend from $8M down to $4M annually. I became convinced that the right way to provision IT is to maximize variable cost and get far away from large up-front capital expenditures. So I joined Ingres and we adopted a solutions sourcing strategy which included the 100% SaaS/OSS goal.
Lots of Solutions on the Menu
We started down this path with salesforce.com already in place for the sales team. We then selected Intacct Financials, and ADP’s HRIS system, all SaaS players themselves. Along the way we implemented SaaS based software from eProsper, Xactly, and others. We get our eMail from a hosting provider named MindSHIFT and our conferencing from WebEx. The only services we have in a data center include a wiki for our intranet (which we plan to replace with another open source provider), and our own Ingres IceBreaker BI Appliance using Jaspersoft. Our customer facing web properties are built with php, MediaWiki, and other open source tools and solutions all running on Ingres atop RedHat Linux, and hosted by Broadspire in Los Angeles and London.
Pay by the Pound
We pay for all this on run rate subscription model, including the open source software solutions (now that they are “in production”). We almost completely avoided the typical up-front data center, server, storage, and software costs of these solutions.
Not Looking Back
If this approach yields results that meet or exceed your business requirements why would you ever buy perpetual software licenses, or build and maintain a data center ever again? Watch this space for more news and stories about this strategy, and our experience thus far.
On the music front, I went to see Eddie Vedder (lead singer from Pearl Jam) last week with Liam Finn. Eddie wrote much of the soundtrack from the film “Into the Wild” last year and did most of those tracks at the show. Sometimes a musician has to “go acoustic” for you to really see through to their soul. This was one of those cases. Don’t miss this concert if it comes your way!
April 16th, 2008 at 8:40 am
Doug, when I heard you speak about this at the salesforce.com conference a few weeks ago, what was most striking to me was when you talked about how different the business model and organization for IT looks like once you decide to go fully on-demand and open source. Seems to me the whole gearing of your organization is different - at Postini we had a business applications team of 10 people doing the caring and feeding of Oracle Financials and our other internal apps and we weren’t much bigger that Ingres is. Can you talk about the mental model and financial model of running a classic on-premises IT shop vs. an on-demand and open source one? What are the career implications for a CIO?