BI Solutions for CIOs
By Anuradha Ramamirtham
Mumbai, Jun 14, 2007

Enterprise open source database company - Ingres - has associated with Jaspersoft, provider of open source Business Intelligence (BI), with an initiative to offer the Ingres Icebreaker BI appliance.

Jaspersoft offers open source reports; analytics and extract, transform and load (ETL) integration. Ingres BI appliance will use these components on top of the previously launched Icebreaker database appliance, the base platform (Ingres plus Linux), providing an integrated solution to the market.

According to Vivek Bhatnagar, country director (global alliances) of Ingres, the data-warehousing/BI projects continue to be one of the highest priorities of CIOs worldwide. However, the biggest challenge faced is the high Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), which emanates from very high deployment, integration, and ongoing maintenance costs.

Ingres has a data-warehousing hardware appliance catering to high-end and huge volume requirements from its partner called DATAllegro. BI was the first area where the company decided to offer a software appliance, using its database appliance - Icebreaker. In the coming months, the company plans to offer appliances in other areas such as content management.

The Ingres BI appliance provides a pre-configured pre-integrated appliance with all the open-source components required for a data-warehousing/business intelligence project namely database, operating system, ETL, and reporting tools. All this is provided with an integrated support directly from its global 24x7 support services network.

Since, this offering is an 'appliance' and not just a 'stack', all components have been integrated and tested to work with each other, and a single install is required.

The support staff will be working behind the scene with Jaspersoft as well as rPath, the software appliance company, to offer support and knowledge on all the components of the appliance.

"The new BI appliance helps the customers to break the cost-barrier as well as shorten the deployment time, and adopt a low-cost BI technology. Thereby making it available for wider areas of the enterprise, including operational BI usage," said Bhatnagar.


The specific benefits of this appliance are: rapid deployment and prototyping fully integrated BI suite, pre-configured database for reporting, secure environment, consolidated patches and change management, and integrated and single-point support from Ingres across multiple vendors.

According to Roger Burkhardt, COO of Ingres, the company is in talks with Alfresco and Salesforce.com for building other area-specific appliances like ECM and CRM.

The Ingres BI appliance is expected to be available by the end of July 2007 with no upfront license costs, but Ingres will be charging an annual subscription fee for providing 24x7 integrated support.