Re: INGRES --> CA-Ingres - and now ?
On Sat, 2 Mar 1996, Udo wrote: > what's your experience 1 1/2 year after the takeover ? > > nice to hear anything. > 1. Tech support has been a vast improvement. We used to have only upgrades + Advisor as we are a small shop and simply could not afford premium support. Now, we have standard support and they have actually been able to help us out. (Sometimes it is only to confirm our workaround but they were able to come up with a constructive scenario for jumping a client from 6.2 all the way to OI 1.1.) There have been a few (fortunately minor) problems they haven't been able to come up with a solution other than to submit a bug report on. 2. The pricing matrix is still standard ASK which (like IRS regulations) is unintelligble even to my CA-Ingres contact. 3. As a smaller shop, I fully expected to be treated as such by a company used to dealing with mainframe size class clients. Happily, this has not been the case. I have been treated with respect and as if I had a very large Ingres shop. 4. I have been pleasantly pleased with the rollout of new products. Some delays were to be expected given that ASK had already driven off much of the talent that made Ingres what it was/is and the flame wars of the summer of 1994 led us to believe that CA had inherited a bunch of vacant buildings and were having to start from ground zero with a bunch of novices. (I never did quite swallow that one.) CA has regained the momentum and I am looking forward eagerly to OI 1.2. In short, the CA acquisition has been a big plus for a once technically superior product which never (until now) received the marketing it richly deserved. CA stated that Ingres would be a strategic product for them (as it should be for a company pushing into client/server) and it appears to be the case with Ingres being the core DBMS for Unicenter/TNG and Masterpiece 2000. One final word to the few CA detractors remaining: ASK had lost any interest in Ingres (or Manman) and were on there way out. Had CA (or some other suitor such as -shudder- Oracle) not come along, the few remaining Ingres shops would have been searching for a worthy successor instead of looking forward to OI 1.2. In short, well done CA; keep up the good work! All IMHO, Lucky NAIUA Member PS. I would like to put in a plug for NAIUA which has taken up our cause in those instances where CA has dropped the ball. A hearty thank you. Lucky Leavell Phone: (812) 945-6555 Relational Information Systems, Inc. FAX: (812) 949-9233 4727 Grant Line Road Email: ris@iglou.com (Internet) New Albany, IN 47150-2013 71534,2674 (CompuServe) WWW Home Page: http://www.iglou.com/ris ftp://www.iglou.com/members/ris