Answering growing demand for open source software globally and in India, Ingres Corporation announced it has opened business operations in India and hired Vivek Bhatnagar as Country Director, Business Development and Global Alliances. Ingres’s operation in India represents the eighth entity to be established by the Company since its venture buy-out by Garnett & Helfrich Capital, and addresses a sizable market opportunity to service India’s government and corporations as well as India’s global system integrator partners, who have taken a leadership role in open source implementations in Global 2000 companies.

“India has rapidly embraced enterprise open source software as a means to lower costs without sacrificing reliability or performance,” said Terry Garnett, CEO of Ingres Corporation and Managing Director at Garnett & Helfrich Capital, at a press conference today in Bangalore. “Having realized the benefits of Linux, India will achieve a new level of global, competitive advantage by embracing the next wave of enterprise open source database offerings available from Ingres.”

To initiate and grow Ingres’s global and domestic alliances with Indian system integrators and ISVs, Ingres has hired Mr. Bhatnagar who will be based in New Delhi. Mr. Bhatnagar joins Ingres from a similar business development and strategic alliances role at Informatica where he led rapid growth in global revenues working with the major Indian system integrators. Mr. Bhatnagar will also be responsible for growing Ingres’s India business, including further developing the Ingres channel ecosystem, and Ingres’s use by India’s national and state governments.

“Business Open Source is quickly becoming the backbone of India’s information technology infrastructure and an integral part of the global infrastructure shift underway to lower cost and standardized systems,” added Mr. Bhatnagar. “Ingres and its India partners have a tremendous opportunity to lead and benefit from that shift.”

A key part of Ingres’s growth strategy is expanding on its existing success with India customers and partners. Ingres has already signed partnerships with a number of India-supported service providers, including netCustomer, Inc. and Cognizant Technology Solutions, which named Ingres 2006 as its preferred database for its Open Source Center of Excellence. Additionally, Ingres enjoys a strong following with customers across all major industries in India: financial services, government, manufacturing, transportation/logistics and energy and utilities, to name a few.

“With its open source database, Ingres 2006, and Project Icebreaker, an integrated appliance of Ingres’s database and the Linux operating system, Ingres is poised to disrupt the global database market with better offerings at a much lower cost,” said Mr. Bhatnagar. “We now turn to India to forge the global alliances that will transform the industry.”

Mr. Garnett added, “Open source is strategic to India’s future, and India is strategic to Ingres’s future. Ingres looks forward to servicing our clients in India and to supporting our India partners as they build open source practices and solutions.”