Ingres has released Icebreaker BI Appliance, a package of software integrating JasperSoft's open-source business-intelligence suite with the Ingres 2006 database running on Rpath Linux.

The software costs US$45,000 a year for license to run it on two processors. Ingres counts a processor as a chip occupying one socket, regardless of the number of cores it has, said Deb Woods, vice president of product management at Ingres.

That configuration could handle a file system of up to 2T bytes, making it suitable for small businesses or for larger ones using it as a departmental server, Woods said.

Ingres already uses the Icebreaker name for a combination of its database and Rpath Linux. Rpath offers a stable Linux distribution and a tool, rBuilder, for packaging applications with it as installable ISO disc images.

Although the Icebreaker BI Appliance package includes no hardware, Ingres calls it an appliance because all the components of the software stack are tightly integrated and because the company supports all the software itself.

Ingres has trained staff to handle first- and second-line support, and plans to liaise with JasperSoft if more complex issues arise, Woods said. Clients will deal only with Ingres, she said.

The company supports its products, in English only for now, from centers in Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. Staff in France and Germany can deal with questions in the local language, but the software itself has not been localized, she said.

By offering the software as a disc image rather bundling it with hardware, Ingres allows customers to save space in their data centers by running it in a virtualization environment on a larger server, Woods said. "You can partition the box and have a lot more flexibility. If you had a box with four or eight sockets, you would only have to pay for the sockets you ran it on."

Customer demand could change that strategy. "We are ready if they want to purchase it with hardware," she said. The company has tested it on hardware from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Sun Microsystems.

There are no plans to provide an appliance based on Solaris, Woods said, as there is no equivalent of Rpath's rBuilder tool for that platform.

The company has tested the appliance with systems integrators including India's Wipro Ltd., which announced in March that it was setting up a team of developers to work with Ingres. It now uses the software stack to power an outsourced performance management service for its customers.

Another Indian company, Satyam Computer Services, offers to install the appliance for customers looking for a low-cost BI system, Ingres said.

Ingres had planned to announce Icebreaker BI Appliance in July, but decided to hold on until partners like Wipro and Satyam were ready to offer services and applications built on top of it, Woods said.