Ingres Corporation and BEA Systems recently announced an agreement  "with the common goal of dramatically lowering costs and increasing flexibility by providing a proven, open source alternative for enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) development."

As a result of the partnership, BEA Workshop Studio is designed to include support for Ingres 2006, the latest release of the enterprise open source relational database.

Emma McGrattan, Senior VP of Engineering at Ingres, outlined the new cooperative agreement between Ingres and "blended" SOA specialist BEA, in an exclusive podcast interview with SYS-CON. She also discussed how Ingres has been faring as an independent, open source technology provider. The interview can be found at http://www.sys-con.tv/read/240621.htm.

BEA Workshop Studio is designed to automatically recognize Ingres, so that developers can begin using the full power of the database tools, and the comprehensive EJB3 O/R Mapping Studio, while accessing new or existing Ingres data sources. Enterprise customers using BEA Workshop Studio can further simplify the development process by incorporating mainframe and commercial data stores using Ingres/Net, Enterprise Access and EDBC.