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Ingres is looking to enable hardware and application-specific appliances as it builds on the momentum of its Icebreaker software appliance project, according to Dargo.

It's now almost a year since the company was spun out of CA and since then has looked to differentiate itself from the database pack with projects such as Icebreaker, Dargo said.

“For the most part we don’t portray ourselves as a database company, we see our success as doing things outside the core database business,” he explained. “It’s more a case of applied science in the business, rather than science for the sake of it,” he added. “Icebreaker is one of the first things you’ll see from us in that area.”

Launched in late August, Icebreaker sees Ingres teaming up with Linux appliance vendor rPath to embed the Linux kernel in the database, so that the combination can be used on a dedicated box with a single install.

According to Dargo, the point of Icebreaker is not integrating the database and the operating system for the sack of it, but to solve business issues related to having two different maintenance support streams. “It’s an opportunity to look at a broader problem in the market,” he said.

Icebreaker will enter beta testing this month with the focus on automated updates, rather than integration, and is due to go into production in December. In the meantime, Ingres is already working on making more of the appliance model, as well as targeting other business needs.

While Icebreaker is a soft appliance that can be installed on any hardware, Dargo said the company has also had requests for a more traditional hardware appliance and that it is in discussion with third party hardware vendors on that.

The company is also talking to third party application vendors about application specific appliance to build on top of Icebreaker. “Icebreaker is a great product as a database service, but we think the great market opportunity will be specialist appliances,” he said.

Potential examples might include email and reporting appliances, he said, and they could include both open and closed source applications. While Ingres is an open source supplier, the fact that it owns its own code enables it to license the code using a proprietary license if requested by an ISV. “The ones we produce will probably be open source, most of the closed source ones will be the ones from third parties,” he added.

As well as expanding the appliance vision, Ingres is also looking at other new ways to approach the market, one of which is focused on better serving the needs of development organizations. “Icebreaker is a database server type of appliance,” explained Dargo. “What you’ll see from us in the next six-to-twelve months is the concept of a virtualized development environment.

Explaining the need for such an environment, Dargo cited a financial service firm where the approval process means that it can take up to nine months to provision a database server in response to a developer request.

What Ingres is coming up with to solve this problem is a bundle of the database with a virtual development environment and development tools that can be delivered initially to the development team to install in-house, but eventually as a hosted service.

This is another example, Dargo maintained, of the company taking a technological solution and applying it to a business problem. “None of the other database developers are going after new markets, they’re competing in traditional ways or playing the price arbitrage game,” he said. “We look at those companies as followers.”

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