Re: Is Ingres the wave of the future?

-->
-->Take a look at market share and market revenue for Oracle and Ingres.
-->Oracle did about 1.4 Billion dollars last year. They grew by 30 to
-->40 %, between 300 and 400 Million dollars. The amount Oracle grew
-->last year is bigger than it's largest competitor's total revenue !

Oracle does indeed have over a billion dollars worth of market share but to suggest that this is ALL RDBMS revenue is rubbish! Oracle is now a systems integrator + developer which means that quite a fair percentage of their revenues are not directly linked to RDBMS market share.

-->
-->Ingres shrank in terms of market share, and I believe in terms of
-->revenue as well.

The revenue you are probably referring to is that of ASK which indeed did shrink. This was due to the ASK side of the business whereas the Ingres side of the business has increased both revenues and market share.

In North America Ingres has shrunk in terms of market share. Worldwide Ingres has grown significantly. In the UK Ingres is the best selling RDBMS and in Europe Ingres grew by 30% and Worldwide Ingres sales grew even by a greater percentage.

-->
-->This certainly does not indicate that Oracle is about to go out of
-->business. In reality, I find more and more that since ASK bought
-->Ingres, people are leaving Ingres off their purchase lists for
-->RDBMS. There have been lots of posts to the net about key Ingres
-->people leaving after the buyout, about poor support, etc.
-->

This did happen initially but that was in the years 1990 and 1991 when Ingres was effectively and organisation within the ASK organisation. Ingres at this point was squeezed in terms of the budget that was allocated. The current situation is different. The new CEO has set about reorganising the situations and more employees have been taken on.

-->You didn't mention your operating environment, but basically I would
-->tell you that right now Oracle is the 800 pound gorilla that is
-->dominating, Sybase is known for strength in client/server
-->applications and smaller apps, and Informix is strong is unix only
-->larger environments. These of course are generalizations, but all
-->three of these products are good an useable, and around to stay.
-->

Oracle is indeed big but that's just one of the issues when deciding which RDBMS to buy. To suggest that Oracle, Sybase and Informix products are good and more useable in relation to Ingres' products is wrong. Just look at last years ButlerBloor report an independant respected, recognised evaluation on RDBMS which is extensive, areas of evaluated were e.g performance, tools, ease of use, distributed functionality, etc,etc INGRES came out on top overall out of the 4 (Oracle, Sybase,Informix)

-->I think Ingres has the most uncertain future of the big 4. Will it
-->become the ASK database, an embedded product for their manufacturing
-->products ? Why is ASK porting their tools to Oracle if they already
-->own such as great DBMS ? I think there are lots of hard questions
-->to be asked. The local reps for both of these and the other DBMS
-->companies should be able to help you.

ASK isn't porting its tools to Oracle. What ASK is doing is opening up their tools so that they will run against other RDBMS's. It is abundantly clear from the market place that the RDBMS is a commodity and the real difference are the tools. If Oracle doesn't see this trend then they have missed something which could cost them!

--
Regards,


Jabir  Patel
Micrognosis (A Division of CSK(UK) Limited)
63 Queen Victoria Street
London England EC4N 4UD
Tel:071-815 5295
Fax:071-815 5201
jpatel_at_micrognosis.co.uk