Fueling Innovation by Avoiding Vendor Lock-in
May 27th, 2009
Earlier today we announced the availability of the Ingres Development Stack for JBoss. This stack is one of the products we defined as part of our “New Economics of IT” strategy. The stack bundles together Ingres and JBoss Developer Studio, and includes treats like JBoss Seam which is a GUI version of QBF but on steroids. David Turner from our Luminary division built a JBoss Seam version of the Ingres Frequent Flyer demo, which looks fantastic, and is written in such a way that you’ll be easily able to follow what David has done and could even use it as a tutorial before building your own applications. Enrico Schenck from our Emerging Technologies Team did a really tremendous job of papering over the seams between the technologies and supplying everything you need to quickly get started. Rico was also responsible for developing the Ingres Database Workbench which is also included in the bundle. As with all products developed at Ingres there’s a huge team involved in their delivery, but I thought that the outstanding work that David and Rico did was worth highlighting.
Our New Economics of IT message stresses the importance of embracing open standards. This bundle enables developers to do exactly that on a set of proven technologies that we know can scale from the developers desktop to the enterprise data center. Writing portable, standards based applications has many benefits including being able to deploy the application on the most suitable technology stack from a price or performance perspective. Avoiding vendor lock-in on the technology side has the added benefit of putting the budget holder in a stronger position when it comes to negotiating with technology vendors.
It is my firm belief that companies that encourage innovation during a difficult climate will emerge from this economic downturn in a stronger position than their competitors who bury their heads in the sand and hope to get through it unscathed. Open source technology providers, like Ingres and Red Hat, who enable and encourage this innovation will be the trusted partners that these companies will look to in the future. They will take the place of proprietary vendors who not only encourage technology lock-in they have in some cases exploited this position by raising prices in a climate when many are struggling to keep the lights on.
