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…)