No welcome for Oracle from Ingres

Database supplier Ingres, an Oracle competitor, has not exactly welcomed the news that its rival has just grown even bigger with the acquisition of Sun Microsystems. Ingres is, like MySQL, an open source database and the company has close ties with other open source suppliers like Red Hat.

Roger Burkhardt, chief executive of Ingres, suggested that open source products now in Oracle's portfolio such as the MySQL database and Glassfish application server would cause it a problem because "Oracle won't allow them to cannibalise the license revenues from their core database and Weblogic application server business".

"Customers won't see the long-term investments required to create a competitive enterprise-class mission and are likely to see MySQL make even more use of proprietary Oracle interfaces and management tools," he said. He believes that Oracle's intention will be to find revenue from the software that up to now has been available at little or no cost.

With the merger, Oracle which has always been a software company, now will find itself selling Sun Microsystems hardware, a position that Burkhardt believes the company has been forced into because "the revenue and earnings momentum from the string of acquisitions that Oracle has made is forcing them to buy into the hardware business as they have run out of software assets to buy".