Ingres Corporation announced it has initiated a partnership with BEA Systems 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.

With its award-winning, professional-level developer tools for the open source Eclipse development environment, BEA Workshop Studio 3.1 is designed to help developers easily tap into Ingres for enterprise projects by simply downloading the free trial version of Ingres 2006.

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.

"BEA's unique blended development model is designed to help enable customers to choose the best mix of open source and commercial software for their needs, while minimizing integration and testing headaches," said Bill Roth, vice president of the BEA Workshop Business Unit. "With Ingres, we can allow customers to incorporate existing enterprise data into SOA."

With this announcement, BEA and Ingres are agreeing to provide Ingres partners and more than 10,000 existing customers worldwide with an on-ramp to SOA-style solutions.

"BEA and Ingres share the goal of increasing developer productivity, lowering costs and providing customers and partners with choice," said Dev Mukherjee, senior vice president of Business Development at Ingres.