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Coinciding with IBMs release of its freebie DB2 version— DB2 Universal Database Express-C (Community Edition)—on Jan. 30, partners rolled out an ecosystem to support it, with news coming from ActiveGrid, Mandriva, Zend Technologies and Net Integration Technologies.
That ecosystem will feature ActiveGrids bundling of DB2 Express-C in its ActiveGrid Enterprise LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) rapid application development platform.
Bob Picciano, vice president of databases for IBM, said that clients are increasingly interested in exploring LAMP as a cost-effective alternative to development.
“With this announcement today, IBM and ActiveGrid offer customers a robust data server platform for building their service-oriented applications,” he was quoted as saying in a release.
Mandriva, which publishes the Mandriva Linux operating system, also announced that it will bundle DB2 Express-C with the next versions of its enterprise products.
Mandrivas Corporate Server 3.0, enterprise infrastructure technology, has already achieved “ready for DB2” status for Intel-based 32-bit platforms.
Ready for DB2 status is under way for Mandriva Linux 2006 and Corporate Server for Intel 64-bit.
“IBMs DB2 is one of most popular business applications, with proven performance and reliability,” said David Barth, Mandrivas worldwide vice president of engineering, in a statement.
“Its availability under a free license will expand the number of software vendors and developers ready to design offerings based on it.”
For its part, Zend Technologies rolled out Zend Core for IBM, a PHP application development environment that will come with a free DB2 Express Data Server and the Java-based Cloudscape relational database for embedded applications.
IBM donated Cloudscape to The Apache Software Foundation in August 2004.
Zend Core for IBM already supported Linux and AIX, whereas the update adds support for Windows. All Zend Core for IBM versions can be downloaded free at Zends site.
“IBM and Zend work together closely to give our customers the highest levels of reliability and uptime for PHP applications using DB2 databases,” said Mark de Visser, chief marketing officer at Zend Technologies, in a statement.
“Zend Core for IBM makes it very easy for our mutual customers to create and deploy professional PHP applications. And when the customers need to scale their applications, they can do so seamlessly with Zend Platform and the high-end IBM DB2 UDB family of database servers.”
Finally, Net Integration Technologies announced that its been named an IBM DB2 Universal Database Express-C launch partner, meaning that its reselling and application developer partners will be able to leverage DB2 without having to pay licensing fees.
Net Integration Technologies develops Nitix, a server-side operating system based on Linux thats designed to be easy for small to midsize businesses to deploy and maintain as they run server-based applications or deliver IT infrastructure services.
Most of its 2,300 resellers used to sell Microsoft Small Business and Windows 2003 Server exclusively in order to deliver that functionality.
“Working with IBM and IBM DB2 application developers, we can create a value proposition where there is no rational reason for any SMB customer that needs to run an application that can use DB2 for its data server not to run DB2,” said Ozzy Papic, president and CEO of Net Integration Technologies, in a statement.
“IBM DB2 Express-C is everything the SMB customer needs: easily deployable, scalable, stable, and untouchable with respect to performance.”