Ingres Hires New President, COO

The open-source database company brings in the former CTO of the New York Stock Exchange to help gear up for aggressive competition with Oracle.

Roger Burkhardt, who helped lead the technology recovery at the New York Stock Exchange following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has been hired as president and chief operating officer of open-source database company Ingres, the company announced on July 11.

In his new role, Burkhardt, 45, will oversee worldwide sales, marketing, global development and engineering organization. In addition, he will sit on the companys board of directors and report directly to Terry Garnett, Ingres chairman and CEO.

Its not surprising that Ingres is hiring an experienced top executive. The company has been less than shy about its plans to snatch Oracle database customers out from under the database kings nose. Berquist told eWEEK in February that Ingres aims to tempt up to 8 percent of customers away from enterprise players such as Oracle.

Computer Associates owned the Ingres relational database for years but didnt aggressively market it. CA announced in May 2004 that it was going to market the Ingres database under an open-source license, then turned around and spun it off as an independent, privately owned company in November 2005.

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Since then, Ingres has been busy building partnerships and expanding its management team. One such partnership, with Cognizant Technology Solutions, was announced in April 2006 as Ingres hooked up with the IT systems integrator to provide customer support for Ingres database deployment.

In an interview with eWEEK, Burkhardt said he was excited about expanding the relationship between Ingres customers—the company has about 10,000 globally—and its partners.

"Open-source technology is one tool that helps put the customer back in the drivers seat, Burkhardt said. "Its a way of giving customers control over their environment."

Before joining Ingres, based in Redwood City, Calif., Burkhardt served as the chief technology officer and executive vice president of the NYSE. He first came to NYSE to help develop electronic trading. Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, Burkhardt was the point man in fixing the NYSEs telecommunications system, which allowed the stock exchange to reopen the next week. After that he worked on making the NYSE more resilient in dealing with another large-scale disruption.

Ingres has made other major hires recently. Click here to read about the database companys new CFO.

While at the NYSE, Burkhardt oversaw the building and deployment of the first automatic execution service. He also helped design the Hybrid Market, a market model that integrates elements of traditional auction market and automated trading, according to a company release.

Burkhardt also played a role in the 2005 acquisition of electronic market Archipelago Holdings, which gave the NYSE a competitive electronic trading platform and simultaneously allowed it to become a public company.

Before joining the NYSE, Burkhardt was president of listed equities for OptiMark Technologies, a developer of electronic trading technology. Previously, he worked for 15 years with IBM, joining as a systems engineer based in the United Kingdom and eventually becoming the director of capital markets for IBM Banking, Finance and Securities. He holds both a B.S. and M.S. in physics from Oxford University and an M.B.A. from New York University.

In an interview, Burkhardt said he had been looking for a CIO position, but when the offer came from Ingres, he felt it was an opportunity to help build a young and up-and-coming company. He also said he felt his previous experience with IBM gave him a feel for the vendor side of the business.

"Rogers experience in leading the tightly linked business and IT transformation of the NYSE and adoption of open source solutions are invaluable to Ingres customers and partners," Ingres CEO Terry Garnett said in a statement. "He is uniquely qualified to help Ingres become a dominant force in the rapidly evolving enterprise software market."

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