I talked to Chris Lynch yesterday from CIO Magazine about our 100% SaaS and Open Source strategy for sourcing IT solutions at Ingres. The article Chris posted is titled: The Benefits of the All-SaaS Shop: Money, Application Integration, and Did We Mention Money? Thanks to Chris the quotes are accurate and I appreciate the time to discuss our strategy. The “money” headline focuses quite a bit on the savings inherit in the SaaS model, and probably my only additional comment would be that what we really look for is cost effective, variable based pricing for our solutions rather than something cheap. Semantics yes, but a distinction. Thanks Chris - glad you are “on the bus”!

 

The past…

For years we in IT have been procuring and installing software and building onsite solutions with our internal resources. We did this based on a series of vendor compatibility matrices - pouring over specifications for operating systems, databases, application and web servers, along with other associated software infrastructure, and following these in exacting detail in order to end up with a supportable solution. We’ve kept all those bits up to date to stay on a certified code stack. Of course at the end of the day what mattered was that the business application or functional utility built on top of all that infrastructure ran reliably and was supported by the vendor.

A Better way…

I believe there are better ways to manage this complexity and an important avenue for this is to rely directly on vendors who have the proven ability to deliver a complete stack of software for a chosen solution. This is why I am so excited by our deployment of open source software “appliances” and “community bundles”, such as the Ingres Icebreaker appliance. (more…)

 

Who is going to the Software 2008 show next week April 29th and 30th in Las Vegas?

I am speaking there Tuesday April 29th at 3:45 p.m. under the following subject heading:

How Digital Killed the Analog Store: Open Source and SaaS Solutions Virtualize Global IT Delivery (also titled “how I stopped building data centers and learned to virtualize IT”). Yes I am fond of the movie “Dr. Strangelove” and that song by “The Buggles”. The presentation will focus on the twin disruptive forces of Open Source and SaaS solutions on the technology marketplace.

Our CEO and President, Roger Burkhardt, is on the keynote Software Trends panel Tuesday at 2:30 p.m., speaking about the future of technology.

Ingres will be there with a booth that emphasizes our latest solutions and services. Oh, get a “back stage pass” to join Ingres in our booth where we will be playing Rock Band and demoing Ingres on a PS3!

Come and see us at Software 2008 and make noise with Ingres!

 

When someone walks into a meeting late, and there are people in the room who are just being introduced, I typically say to the latecomer, “Welcome - hey - as an icebreaker, everyone here already told a story from their childhood. Something involving fire would be good.” Once in awhile they oblige! Well, I suppose, being a late comer to the blogosphere I should go ahead and tell you one of mine.

I have been a dedicated fan of popular music from the time I was three years old. I still have a copy of the Beatles record, “Rubber Soul” that I played repeatedly, sneaking into my sister’s room to use the record player. At that early age I became a complete Anglophile. Ten years later, I was spinning anything out of Britain from the progressive rock acts of the time, including Jethro Tull, Yes, and so on. The “new wave” movement hit in the late 70’s and early 80’s and I was then again hooked on all types of creative bands such as Depeche Mode, Cocteau Twins, and others that mixed fashion, electronics and lots of attitude. (more…)