European Roadshow
June 13th, 2007
Last week we had a hugely successful Ingres User Group meeting in the UK with twice as many attendees as our 2006 event. It was great to see a number of new faces in the audience, and I heard it described by some of our more seasoned customers as the best Ingres event in years. We had tremendous partner support at the event with speakers and exhibitors representing Ingres partners new and old. Donald MacCormick from Business Objects delivered a particularly interesting keynote, providing entertaining anecdotes of how business intelligence benefits the business and real worlds. After a visit with the Ingres team in the Paris office, I spent the weekend visiting Burgundy’s finest wine producers with two of my colleagues from Ingres. We discovered that the production of wine is a more complex challenge, with more moving parts, than engineering a multi-threaded DBMS server.
Today I visited with the Ingres European Technology Center in Ilmenau, Germany. As a special treat my colleague Dirk Paasche had organized a visit to CDA, one of Europe’s largest independent manufacturers of optical storage media. CDA uses an OpenROAD application, built and supported by Dirk and his team over the past 15 years, to manage their production, labeling and packaging processes. It was really fascinating to see how CD and DVD technologies have evolved over the past 15 years in order to meet the constant demand to increase the storage capacity of a 12cm disc. The evolution from CD to DVD and from single to dual layers and single to double sided disks was reflected in the wide array of equipment on the factory floor, some of which dated back to the early 90’s. I was enthralled by the speed and accuracy of the modern machines and we stopped on many occasions to observe the important role that the Ingres application plays in CDA’s business operations. The warehouse at CDA is run on SAP software which uses the data from the Ingres application as one of its primary sources of information. I had never been in a completely automated warehouse before, and while it was a little eery, I was in awe of the robot’s ability to pinpoint the palettes it required, extract them from a six storey structure and deliver them to their required destination. CDA’s latest innovation is a DVD with an RFID chip embedded in it, and before leaving the factory I was given a prototype to remember my visit.
Tomorrow I’ll be speaking at an Ingres User Association event in Germany. Its been over a year since we last met with the German Ingres User Association so there’s a lot of ground to cover.
