Roger Burkhardt serves as president and chief executive officer of Ingres. In this role he is responsible for all facets of the company's worldwide business. He also serves on the company's Board of Directors. As president and CEO, Roger is responsible for corporate strategy, development, engineering, and global field operations including marketing, sales and support, alliance and channels, and customer programs.

Prior to Ingres, Roger was the chief technology officer and executive vice president of the New York Stock Exchange, where he led a global technology team of 2,000 colleagues through the most important business and technology transformation in the Exchange's history: the shift to electronic trading. Under his leadership, the NYSE embraced open source solutions, maintained world-class reliability standards, and increased transaction volumes seven-fold.

Prior to the NYSE, Roger was president of listed equities for OptiMark Technologies, a developer of electronic trading technology that was adopted by more than 80 percent of the top 200 trading firms in the United States. He was also with IBM for 15 years where he held several leadership positions in engineering, sales, and business development. Most recently, he served as director of capital markets, IBM Banking, Finance and Securities, where he ran a $250 million business unit serving the needs of the Wall Street banking community.

Roger currently serves on the Board of Directors of MarketAxess (MKTX), which operates one of the leading platforms for the electronic trading of corporate bonds and other fixed-income securities. He holds an MBA. in finance from New York University and both a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Physics from Oxford University. A former member of the IBM Advisory Board, Roger is recognized by Wall Street and technology innovators worldwide for his customer advocacy work and thought leadership.

We asked Roger Burkhardt a few questions about the vision that drives Ingres strategy, about its choice of the OSS business model, and about Ingres future plans.  Here is a cutting-edge vision about the place of OSS in companies IT strategy. Brilliant food for thought.

Ingres's vision of open source

The domain that Ingres serves, we see organisations running major financial systems on Ingres software; we have seen governments move their customs and tax processing to Ingres, we’ve seen major financial institutions move their credit card processing to Ingres and thus we have a long legacy of running mission critical applications. We run production lines for cars and chips, we schedule airplanes for 110 different airlines around the world. We are very confident that we can provide enterprise grade capabilities as we have done it for many years. We are not alone in being enterprise-ready; there are many other OSS providers that have achieved the maturity to support enterprise class application use.

How mature is the enterprise OSS ecosystem?

As a customer, what you really need is excellent support. Anyone can download free software, but enterprises need the assurance of support, in case they face problems. Apart from our experience of supporting mission critical applications at Ingres, I see large sophisticated System Integrators (SI), who are stepping up and providing support for companies doing large, mission-critical enterprise OSS deployments. Whether they are Indian or Western SIs, these are global players who’ve stepped forward to solve a problem and these include the larger technology companies like IBM and HP.

So the key thing that you look for as a customer is acquiring capable and sophisticated partners. I’m really confident that in today’s enterprise environment, these can be easily found. These partners, in turn, will act as advisors about which particular OSS technologies are appropriate for what particular use. Like anything else in life, you have to choose the right tool for the job.

Can you iterate some challenges that are unique to OSS?

One of the great benefits of OSS is how quickly it can be procured and put to work. An individual developer can choose a tool, download it and get started. That is the great strength of open source, but it also is something that as a CTO or CIO, you need to keep an eye on, because what you don’t want is every developer using different tools. It makes the environment very complex and makes skill management a challenge. Although it’s great to take advantage of the speed with which you can get hold of open source software, I actually believe that it makes the question of standards even more important. No CIO can afford to have five different open source applications running in your environment as keeping track of skills and managing systems becomes pretty tough.

What CIOs need to do is realise that OSS adds tremendous value and then pick one tool that meets your needs. Thus picking an OSS component that meets your needs and then building a set of skills around that component is really important.

In your experience, what are some of the hurdles preventing CIOs from adopting OSS?

I think that one of the biggest hurdles is an educational piece and involves getting familiar with the technology and the practices around OSS. Once you get beyond that and start looking at the technologies, you will realise how widely used OSS is, I think it becomes very straightforward to get benefits out of OSS.

Many of the things that CIOs have learnt over the years about managing technology still apply. It’s still important to have change management, standards and well trained staff. Thus all the things that we as CTOs, have worked on for many years, don’t go out of the window but you can just get better leverage out of those good practices.

What are some of the factors driving enterprise OSS adoption?

I think that one of the most tremendous things about OSS, apart from the cost reductions, is the control that you have over your environment. You have the flexibility to choose different offerings and combine them in ways that you, the customer, want. That allows organisations to be much quicker to market with new products and services and avoid getting “locked-in” to a particular vendor’s path. In other words, the key thing about OSS is that it puts the customer back in charge.

Can you outline some emerging OSS technology trends?

It will be interesting to see how OSS is moving to mainstream and enterprise scale applications. Many customers don’t realise that many of the products that they are using rely on OSS. Other customers are wholeheartedly adopting OSS with a view to use it for their mainstream applications. This is an interesting trend and India seems to be at the fore front of this, perhaps because of the tremendous skill base possessed by the Indian SIs.

Can you describe the evolving business model for enterprise OSS?

The classic open source business model has been one where the key intellectual property is available for no charge, under a GPL license, which allows customers to modify the software. This is very important because it puts the customer back in charge. It stops them from being “locked-in” to a particular vendor and being forced to upgrade periodically by vendors, when they don’t wish to upgrade.

Open source providers make their money by providing a very large range of services structured around the software itself, full indemnification for intellectual property, and consulting and system integration services to help customers maximize the use of their capabilities.

I think some open source companies have found it challenging to generate revenue from their technology. This brings us back to the question of enterprise readiness of OSS applications. When you have customers using OSS for enterprise scale applications, they are very willing to pay for support, in fact most customers demand support. If they are only using OSS as an application that is at the periphery and doesn’t matter too much, then sometimes there is not the same willingness to pay.

So I think an important part of the maturing of the open source industry, is this recent trend to run more and more mission critical applications on open source. As what we have found is that customers are not only willing to pay, but they demand to pay in return for support. No one wants to be running a production line on software and not have a support contract if they need help.

What are some of the benefits that OSS can bring to the start-up and SME?

Open source offers a tremendous advantage to the start-up. As a start-up, you don’t want to spend a lot of your precious capital on big, up front expenses till you know that you are going to see revenue. Thus using the open source model eliminates those up front licensing costs, which can be extremely onerous. It is also important as it allows start-ups to get to market quickly as the speed of innovation and development around open source allows this.

Open source is of great interest to the SME market. Many of these companies are looking for a highly cost effective solution that doesn’t require a large technical staff to run. What they are looking for are integrated solutions from providers that service the mid-market, which enable them to basically plug-n-play. They want a total solution for tools ranging from BI to transaction processing and they can get that without being beholden to a single provider. This is because open source companies collaborate well in creating integrated stacks for the SME market place.

What is your vision of BI?

Business Intelligence projects are one of the highest priorities for CIOs worldwide. CIO´s are also looking for different ways to reduce costs in today’s market.
Two different methods have become popular – appliance and “software as a service” or SAAS – and open source solutions are being deployed in both models. In order to understand which model is most cost effective, you need to understand what the customer is looking to achieve. SAAS models allow customers to reduce overall hardware and maintenance costs while hosting their application and data offsite. But software appliances allow customers to reduce maintenance and startup costs while still maintaining their data behind their firewalls. Software appliances are a great way to give access to information in a cost-effective manner and still keep your data local.
At Ingres we offer the Icebreaker BI Appliance; it includes a database appliance running on Linux and business intelligence tools from JasperSoft, another commercial open source company.

An appliance is more than a bundle of different programs; it’s a tightly woven software stack that comes with one license, one contract, one number to call for support.

With the Icebreaker BI Appliance, the customer is not really aware of the operating system or database underneath, but simply knows that they have a robust, enterprise solution that is capable of supporting their BI workload. It’s an appliance that they don’t have to give a second thought to.

Behind the scenes, though, Ingres put it all together using the flexibility of Linux. The open source aspect made it easy for us to work with the product, tune it for our needs and deliver a solution much faster than if it involved proprietary components. When we had an issue, we looked at the code and resolved the problem.

Appliances are a good match for customers who need a dedicated solution. Startup and install time is kept to a minimum along with license and maintenance costs. If the customer is running on a non-Linux platform, they can deploy the appliance in a virtual machine setting – sharing information with other non-Linux machines across the network.

Early adopters of appliances are reporting 70–80% savings in the setup, configuration, and deployment of their solutions. It’s still early to measure lifecycle costs, but we anticipate significant savings for our customers from the integrated maintenance that is included with the Icebreaker product.

At Ingres, we see appliances as an important part of our product offering going forward. The appliances are attractive to software integrators who can build their own applications on top of it, getting the same benefits of reliability and cost effectiveness. Appliances offer the added benefit of speeding the time-to-market for such custom applications.

We are beginning to see a number of open source players using the appliance model to deliver their solutions. It’s a cost-effective means to deliver a solution to the marketplace as well as a great platform for multiple open source companies to collaborate together to add value to the marketplace. At Ingres we have worked with a number of ISVs and system integrators in delivering appliances and see it as an important part of our business going forward.

How has the open source progressed during these last months in general, and particularly in BI ?

Business intelligence is our fastest-growing application area driven in large part by the customer's need to extract more business value out of information locked away in ERP applications.

What is the motivation of users to use BI ?

There are two major reasons for using Business Intelligence: Information Power and Economy.
 
Having the right information at right time (at the right person) is key. Companies that leverage, exploit and maximize their information assets have a strategic advantage over their competitors.
Business today moves at the speed of information. Getting the right information into the right hands at the right time is absolutely essential.
The other reason using Business Intelligence is the economy. In an effort to survive the current economic storm, companies have focused on two main areas – reducing costs and increasing revenue. Where Business Intelligence systems have been implemented, a company can pull together cost information from all internal organizations, which shows where the costs are, what the costs are, and provides a framework for making cost cutting decisions. When the cost cutting is complete, the organization can view exactly what has been done and detail the impact in ‘real-time.’

In order to increase revenue, firms must focus on retaining customers as well as acquiring new ones. Retaining customers is always the most attractive. But understanding the profitability of the customer base is the first step. Typically, 20% of customers account for 80% of the profits. Firms first need to segment the customer base by profitability and act to retain the most profitable. Retaining these customers will provide the greatest lift to profits. Business Intelligence enables this segmentation.

The next step is analyzing the attributes and behaviors of the most profitable customers. This knowledge can then be used to help manage customers up the profitability ladder – making not-so-profitable customers more profitable. This could be completed by enticing customers to use lower cost channels, up-selling customers to higher revenue items or cross-selling customers to higher margin items. The important item is to differentiate the treatment based on profitability – companies should not be treating all customers equally, for they are not all equal.

Finally, this understanding and analysis allows firms to identify prospects that are similar to their most profitable customers and target them for acquisition. This provides an influx of customers who are most likely to be profitable. The Business Intelligence environment is the enabler for these types of activities. For within this environment, customer information is consolidated throughout the enterprise. Sales information, contact history, customer service information, channel preference, revenue history, product preference and demographic data are all brought together. The Business Intelligence toolset further provides the functionality required to analyze the information and produce meaningful customer intelligence as well as measure the results of retention and acquisition efforts have on increasing revenue.

What is the future of open source model ?

Industry analysts predict that the open source database market will continue to grow during the next 5 years, exceeding $1 billion by 2012. This predicted growth is second only to operating systems in the open source market.
Ingres vision on the future of open source: Organizations will need to make a defining choice in the next 10 years. Companies can either accept the expense and "lock-in" of proprietary vendors, or take advantage of the cost-effectiveness and freedom of open source. Open source offers opportunities for innovation and adaptability that are unmatched in the closed-source realm and makes open source increasingly attractive for organizations of all types.

What is the differantiator, the innovation of INGRES concept/model/technology ?

Ingres is the leading open source database provider for mission critical systems.
The differentiators are:

• Ingres has 25+ years of experience delivering technology for mission critical systems (proven technology)
• Ingres has 25+ years of experience delivering services for mission critical systems (24x7 support, consultancy and training9
• Ingres is a profitable company and the 2nd largest 100% open source supplier worldwide (RedHat is number 1)
• Ingres grows 35%+ annually.

Explain INGRES in a few words ?

Ingres Corporation is a leading provider of open source information management services to the enterprise. Built on over 25 years of technology investment, Ingres is a leader in software and service innovation, providing the enterprise with proven reliability combined with the value and flexibility of open source.
The Ingres Database offers high-volume transaction processing, high availability, multi-platform support, and security for mission-critical application deployments. Our software and support services are designed to provide customers these enterprise-class features at a lower total cost of ownership. We also offer our database software as part of integrated software appliances, enabling customers to rapidly and cost-effectively deploy, manage, and maintain open source solutions throughout the enterprise.

These appliances are the result of our work with leading business intelligence and content management providers. Our business intelligence appliance delivers advanced reporting and data analysis capabilities; while our appliance for content management allows for the management of structured and unstructured data.

As an open source company, Ingres has an active community of developers that continually test our code, influence our product roadmap by submitting specific feature requests, and contribute code for inclusion in our software. When integrating their applications with our database, developers increase their productivity given their direct access to our source code.

We provide dedicated, professional support on a 24/7 basis to our enterprise customers and ISVs in 20 languages and more than 50 countries. We offer our customers a variety of support options ranging from online access to on-site support.

Ingres is headquartered in Redwood City, California, and has major development, sales, and support centers throughout the world, supporting thousands of customers in the United States and internationally.