The open source database field gained a new player last November when Computer Associates spun off its Ingres database into the Ingres Corporation.

CA released the database's source code in 2004 and last November teamed up with Garnett & Helfrich Capital in creating the new company. 

The marketplace at the time was far from convinced that the new venture had a potential for success.

"I have no reason to believe that this will pose a significant challenge to any already open database management system," Peter O'Kelly, a senior analyst with the Burton Group, told vnunet.com in November.  

But Ingres is determined to prove its critics wrong. The company has grown to 180 employees and has hired Bill Maimone as its chief architect.

Maimone was a senior Oracle executive who played a key role in the research and development of Oracle's database.

At Ingres he will rejoin Dave Dargo, another former Oracle researcher and Ingres' current chief technology officer.

vnunet.com met with Dargo at Ingres' Silicon Valley office. In the first of a two-part interview, Dargo discusses the company's plans for the database market and how it will compete with Oracle and MySQL. Part two of the interview can be seen here.

In terms of positioning the Ingres products, are you going after niche markets like financial services and emerging user cases, or are you trying to compete head on with Oracle?

I think there is a combination of things. We're seeing much greater interest from potential partners because it's very difficult for a partner of Oracle today to also be a competitor of Oracle.

So if you're an email company and you want to use the Oracle database as part of your solution, you're competing against Oracle's email solution, whereas Ingres is a pure-play database.

In that sense, I'm going for the niche market or somebody who wants to have an embedded relational database, and I'm also going against Oracle.

I don't believe from a business perspective that we have to topple Oracle's business as well. Oracle is a $10bn company in a $15bn market. We really only need a few percentage points of market share.

We are a sustainable, survivable company in our current size and with our current install base. But the more Oracle continues its business practices and its ways of interacting and working with customers, the more opportunity is created for us.

Their customer base is very angry and I think is looking for alternatives to Oracle, and we think we will provide a great alternative. We don't have to create a strategy which says that we're going to go out there and displace Oracle from every site.