Ingres Turns to Acquisition to Extend Global Reach

Ingres Tuesday announced the purchase of Thinking Instruments, one of its resellers and services providers, to extend its presence in Germany and the Middle East.

The move is the open-source database company’s first acquisition since becoming an independent company in November after being spun off from CA.

Ingres has already closed the purchase, and Thinking Instruments’ former headquarters in Ilmenau, Germany, has become an Ingres field office. The two companies started negotiating the deal early this year and reached an agreement in June. Ingres didn’t reveal the financial terms of the acquisition.

Thinking Instruments had been an Ingres reseller for 13 years with particular customer and services expertise in the public sector, steel and energy industries.

Ingres is actively considering other acquisitions as a way to grow its global operations. Prior to its acquisition by CA in 1994 through the purchase of the ASK Group, the Ingres relational database enjoyed particularly strong sales in the United Kingdom and Australia, but never achieved the kind of worldwide presence of rival Oracle.

Ingres languished during its time at CA and was eventually released as an open-source project in 2004. In November 2005, CA sold Ingres to private equity firm Garnett & Helfrich Capital, which formed Ingres as a new company to develop and market the open-source software. CA maintains a minority stake in Ingres. The Ingres database is embedded in several key CA products including the Unicenter systems management software and the eTrust security software.

Earlier this month, Ingres announced the appointment of Roger Burkhardt, the former chief technology officer of the New York Stock Exchange, as the company’s president and chief operating officer. While venture capitalist Terry Garnett remains interim chief executive officer at Ingres, the intention is that Burkhardt will take over that role in about a year’s time.

-China Martens, IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)

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