Ingres Launches Open Source Enterprise Content Management Offering to Drive Significant Cost Savings

Business Wire, Feb 24, 2009

New Content Management Solution Powered by Alfresco Part of "The New Economics of IT"

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -- Ingres Corporation, a leading provider of open source database management software and support services, today announced the availability of the Ingres Icebreaker Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Appliance. Powered by Alfresco's open source alternative software for enterprise content management, the Ingres Icebreaker ECM Appliance gives businesses a highly-reliable way to manage today's extraordinary business content growth. It does this at a fraction of the cost of proprietary software vendor ECM market solutions that charge expensive upfront license costs and ultimately lock-in businesses with the threat of always-rising maintenance costs. Like other commercial open source solutions, the Ingres Icebreaker ECM Appliance lets IT purchasers pay only for the software and support they actually need. To download the latest version, please go to http://esd.ingres.com.

"Content is growing at unprecedented rates, and document retention is becoming the norm. Today's content management solutions are often cost prohibitive and difficult to implement - until now," said Deb Woods, vice president of product management at Ingres. "We built the Ingres Icebreaker ECM Appliance which is powered by Alfresco to give businesses a real, reliable, and cost-savvy way to manage the ever-increasing abundance of content in today's business world. It is affordable because it is a solution based on the open source business model. As businesses face shrinking IT budgets - this product is another example of the New Economics of IT at work where open source solutions break the budget blockage to enable innovation."

In today's difficult economic climate, enterprises are being forced to find alternative IT solutions that are just as good, if not better, than more traditional solutions, but cost much less. Commercial lock-in from proprietary vendors leads to high up-front fees and yearly maintenance and support costs that only continue to increase. Architectural lock-in further escalates prices, eliminates options and access to code, and inhibits companies' ability to innovate. Companies that embrace The New Economics of IT will be better able to maintain their systems during the current economic downturn, keep essential projects alive, and pursue innovations that may give them a competitive advantage when present conditions improve.

"This is one solution of many others that we believe we'll see more of in 2009 and moving forward - where leading open source companies combine their advanced technologies to give businesses a real alternative to over-priced propriety offerings. By combining open source technologies from Ingres, Alfresco, and rPath we can provide a competitive alternative to a more expensive SharePoint stack and eliminate the need for only Microsoft components," said Roger Burkhardt, president and CEO at Ingres. "We believe the days of predatory pricing practices by behemoth software companies are on the way out - in today's economic climate, we believe businesses will embrace open source alternatives that are just as advanced and reliable, and in some cases, cost up to 90% less."

Ingres Icebreaker ECM Appliance Powered by Alfresco

For the Ingres Icebreaker ECM Appliance, Ingres provides the open source database for a company's advanced data repository needs, Alfresco provides the content management expertise, and their technology runs on the Ingres Database. It is an appliance that allows developers to bring two best-of-breed open technologies together - and they run it all on the open source Linux operating system. The Ingres Icebreaker ECM Appliance seamlessly integrates the operating system, the database, and the ECM technology and is installed as a unit, managed as a unit, and maintained as a unit. It allows companies to take advantage of an already-integrated business-class open source software solution that improves IT investment around content management.

"Open source technologies like that of Alfresco and Ingres are filling a very important gap for enterprises looking to lower IT costs without compromising on performance, availability, and support," said John Powell, CEO of Alfresco Software. "The Ingres ECM Appliance powered by Alfresco is an integrated solution that offers customers all the power of an enterprise-class content management system in a simple to install, configure, and manage appliance. ConnectedWeddings is an excellent example of how Alfresco and our partners Ingres, Red Hat, and Rivet Logic have come together to deliver the customer a true open source infrastructure solution for ECM that is low cost, scalable, highly reliable and rich in functionality."

Forrester Research recently reported that office paper has undergone double-digit growth year-over-year since 1995. Internet content growth has surpassed even those numbers. Employees are spending countless hours trying to locate information and then struggle once they locate the data to determine if they have the latest version. ECM systems offer a valuable solution to this growing problem, and are focused on five key areas: capturing, storing, managing, preserving, and delivering business-class data to customers and partners.