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Technology

Open Source Makes “Cents” for the Public Sector

By Alice Kok | 31 October 2008

Written by Roger Burkhardt, CEO, Ingres Corporation

Public Sector organisations all have one thing in common – they answer to the taxpayers. Government agencies are always looking for the best way to quickly deliver IT enabled services to their citizens while driving down costs. And they want a flexible subscription model so that if budgets and services are cut back then their costs go down as well. These are just two reasons why more and more Public Sector agencies are turning to Open Source. As guardians of the taxpayers money, Open Source simply makes “cents.”

Asian nations see investment in e-Government services as a transformational force for their future. Providing government services online can improve efficiency and certainly improves access to them by citizens. Open Source allows these systems to be built without expensive up—front investments in license fees and, with Ingres, without compromising on critical needs for privacy, security and reliability. Ingres Public Sector customers are successfully running a broad spectrum of mission critical applications including online tax and customs systems that process billions every year.

Government agencies have a special responsibility to promote competition through a procurement process that use open standards to encourage competition. Savvy procurement officers are challenging legacy vendors to compete with Open Source software providers who drive down agency costs by eliminating license fees and reducing hardware and support costs. They are researching the wide variety of Open Source solutions and then offering their users a viable alternative to legacy vendors. With Open Source, Public Sector agencies can build a robust and reliable IT infrastructure and numerous applications at a low cost.

One example is the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) which relies on an Ingres Open Source database to help law enforcement solve crimes against children. In operation 24 hours a day, seven days a week, NCMEC uses Ingres Open Source Database to run both internal and external systems for the organization. Ingres technology supports NCMEC’s entire website, internal operations, missing child case management system, and the storing and distribution of leads on missing and exploited children.

Why Ingres? NCMEC has huge amounts of critical data on missing and exploited children that must stay secure. It is imperative that privacy be maintained at all times for the safety and security of the children. Ingres is the only Open Source DBMS on the market today that can provide this level of security in an enterprise environment. For NCMEC – as with many other Public Sector organizations - Ingres was the clear choice.

But don’t just listen to us – listen to analysts from Gartner and Forrester. In a report this year, Gartner points out that Ingres is top in class for mission critical applications. Forrester states the same in a presentation this year on the state of the Open Source market, writing that Ingres is a mature and proven database used for mission critical deployments.

Now that makes cents – and sense!

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