Your Letter raises a number of concerns, many of which relate to the perception of Ingres in the marketplace. In the past few months, Computer Associates has made many changes that demonstrate a continued commitment to Ingres and related technologies as we move into the new millennium.
As you had undoubtedly noticed, the visibility of Ingres at CA World '99 was greatly increased from previous years. The Ingres World conference was moved from the Sheraton to the Convention Center specifically to increase the attendance in the Ingres sessions. Ingres' presence in the WRC, as well as representation in other conferences, was also increased.
These steps are part of a program to ensure that our clients, partners, industry and wall street analysts and press representatives are not only up-to-date on the latest Ingres technical enhancements and developments, but are also aware of the thousands of mission-critical implementations of Ingres around the world. Hundreds of attendees from the Executive Programs and other conferences participated in Ingres and OpenROAD sessions and hands-on workshops, and watched numerous demonstrations of real-world client applications based on Ingres technology. We expect that this trend of cross-conference interest will increase in the coming years.
In addition to increasing Ingres visibility at CA-World, we have also renewed our focus on direct mail, press releases, advertising, and tradeshow participation for Ingres in the past year. These efforts are already beginning to pay dividends - not only in additional visibility for Ingres, but also in increased revenue.
We have also broadened our approach to quality assurance in response to user feedback regarding patch and release quality. We have added user test cases into our QA cycle, and we have also implemented separate QA groups: development QA will focus solely on release quality, while a separate maintenance QA group will focus on patch quality. We have also incorporated larger environments into our testing cycle, and instituted a single-fix patch model from the Level 2-support group.
This new patch model streamlines the problem resolution process by sending only those fixes needed to solve a specific problem, instead of all fixes created since the last maintenance release. Individual fixes are confirmed in a client environment, and all fixes are sent to all clients only as part of a fully tested maintenance release. This model eliminates the possibility of introducing unwanted changes into the client production environment and also enables us to produce more frequent maintenance releases of a higher quality.
As the new year approaches, we can assure you that we have concluded comprehensive testing if Ingres, OpenROAD, and all related and peripheral technologies. We are completely confident that the latest releases of these products are Y2K-compliant. Of course, we cannot make the same guarantee for third party or user-written Ingres or OpenROAD applications.
Enhancements implemented in OpenROAD Release 4.0 resolve many of the installation and licensing challenges related to your request for Web-based and other deployment options. OpenROAD 4.0 supports the shared drive installation model, which addresses software delivery and client installation issues. In addition, in response to user requests, we have moved the OpenROAD license check from the client machine to the server. This removes the requirement to interact with LicenseIT for client machines.
Event-driven client / server applications such as those developed with OpenROAD are not well suited to browser deployment. Significant application re-engineering is required to provide a layered architecture with clear boundaries between user presentation, business logic, and data access.
As the Jasmine TND infrastructure becomes available, its common services will provide the capability to partition applications. Users may then develop partitioned applications, writing the user interfaces with their tool of choice. This will allow Web-enabled technologies, such as Java, to access business logic written in OpenROAD. OpenROAD client applications can also access all the functionality provided by the Jasmine TND infrastructure.
Support for packaged applications under Ingres continues to be difficult issue. We at CA, are more than willing to work with SAP and other vendors, but unfortunately, these vendors are driven by market demand. Until the organizations that are successful with Ingres make their demands known to the application vendors, CA alone cannot provide a strong enough business case to justify Ingres support.
Although the issue of benchmarks is raised frequently, we feel that a focus on so-called industry "standard" benchmarks does not accurately reflect real world business environments. In addition, running a benchmark requires a significant resource commitment from both CA and the hardware vendor. Therefore, instead of investing in abstract benchmarks, we have focused on optimizing Ingres for real-world requirements, and are working with a number of clients and partners to benchmark real applications and transactions. If you know of clients who can assist us in building these types of real-world benchmarks, please let us know.
The most significant recent development is our acquisition of platinum Technology. This acquisition provides us with the tools and the manpower to create and deliver the most comprehensive information management solutions in the market today and into the future. The Ingres products especially benefit from this acquisition. On the product side, the Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence suites will be expanded to provide seamless integration with the database and gateway technology. Perhaps a more significant advantage that the acquisition brings to CA is a vast sales and technical organization with expertise and experience in information management. These new resources will not only enable us to capitalize on database opportunities, but will also introduce Ingres Technologies into sites that are embarking on data warehousing, knowledge management, and comparable projects with existing Platinum tools.
We believe that the future is very bright for the Ingres product suite. I appreciate your interest and your feedback, and I trust that you share our enthusiasm and confidence in the direction in which we are heading. Thank you for your support. If CA or I can be of any assistance, please do not hesitate to call.