Sanjay Kumar

Computer Associates International

One Computer Associated Plaza

Islandia

New York

United States of America

Wednesday, 24th March 1999

Dear Sanjay

I am writing on behalf of the International Ingres User Association (II_USERS). This group, set up last year, co-ordinates the activities of all the Ingres User Associations world wide. We meet annually, representing Ingres user associations, once a year at CA World.

One of the objectives of II_USERS is to help CA in the success of what we believe to be a world beating product - Ingres. As part of that, we been polling all the user groups as to the top five concerns that they have with the product set. We want to feed this into CA in a constructive way - but we also would like a formal response that looks at these concerns.

Each user group - there are 24 countries making up II_USERS - has looked at their top five 'hot' issues with the product set. Having collated the responses, there is a theme, which shows that all user associations have the same issues.

These issues are:

This was mentioned by every single user association. Most put it top of the list. They believe that Ingres is not well marketed across the world in terms of promotional and selling activity. They all think Ingres II is a world class product - and it is - but that CA are not getting the message out. In particular, it was felt that not enough technical support was offered to the sales teams - and that the sales team often don't understand the product. In particular, there are related issues, detailed below, which have affected the position of Ingres in the marketplace adversely. All associations want these addressed.

CPU pricing - rather than per user pricing - was mentioned by smaller countries that get Ingres from VARs. This is perceived as more expensive.

There is a shortage of decent third party products that run on Ingres. This, more than anything, leads to sites moving away from the product into the arms of Oracle. Most associations mentioned the lack of a SAP port to Ingres. Simply, this is making the product undesirable compared to other relational databases. If major product vendors do not want to port product to Ingres, then this makes users question their own commitment. This is a marketing issue, and Ingres' position to the marketplace suffers.

I can not stress too strongly how many associations felt that the lack of a SAP port meant that major areas of the Ingres market place will decline.

Having sites within the associations that have both Ingres and Oracle, most believe Ingres II is faster. But this can not be proved without benchmarks. The user community was very disappointed when the proposed Ingres II benchmarks didn't go ahead. Ingres badly needs something to shout about - and the user associations feel performance benchmarks would mark the re-launch of Ingres as a true rival to Oracle.

Many associations mentioned that it was perceived that the Ingres product set was beginning to fall back. This was not in the case of the server, but in areas such as data warehouse tools and other add on's to the main product set. In particular, the application server for OpenROAD was appreciated, but it is considered essential that OpenROAD should - somehow - run in a browser. Other than a plug in, some associations strongly suggested that OpenROAD should generate Java source. The lack of a world class report generator (like Crystal Reports) in OpenROAD 4.0 is also mentioned.

Finally, the user associations expressed concern with the quality of some releases. Most sites now avoid the first release (the /01) as it is expected to have some problems. Some sites have also taken to testing patches in detail before applying them - as they can cause new, other problems. We would appeal to CA to share with us, and to tighten up on, the patch testing procedure from support. In particular, we would like a blanket assurance on the Y2K issue.

A final point was the unacceptability of LicenceIT as a solution for most Ingres sites. However, this urgent issue has been addressed following some correspondence with Wei Wong, and communicated to users via the user associations. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Wei and CA for their prompt resolution of that issue.

As you can see, the main element of feedback is that Ingres is not winning market share - and it should, feeding into more success for CA and for successful outcomes for Ingres users. The issues are not primarily technical ones - they all revolve around marketing. We are all happy with Ingres II, we just want to see more of it. We believe a co-ordinated marketing campaign, incorporating benchmarks, a SAP port and more 3rd party product support would make a major difference.

We propose to keep the details of this letter confidential within the confines of the user association committees, together with your response, but would like to agree a joint statement on these top issues that can be given to the user base via the normal conferences and mailings all our consistuant user associations hold all the time. We would also like to post this on the various web sites and newgroups to get the - hopefully - positive message that we can all agree moves the product onwards.

Ideally, we would like to see a response - and agree the way forward with respect to a message that we can help CA communicate to users - before CA World in July. This initiative is being co-ordinated by the II_USERS committee. Currently, I am President, with the rest of the committee being Phil James from Australia, Steffen Weigert from Switzerland and Mike Green representing North America.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing your views on our issues.

Yours sincerely

Mike Prollins

President

International Ingres User Association

Annex - Members of International Ingres User Association

Australian Ingres User Association

Barbados - personal representative

Belgium Ingres User Association

Danish Ingres User Association

Finnish Ingres User Association

German Ingres User Association

Ingres User Group of Romania

Ingres User Group of South Africa

Ingres User Group of the Netherlands

Irish Ingres User Association

Israel - personal representative

North American Ingres User Association

India - personal representative

RUBIS (Swiss-German Ingres User Group)

SWINGRES (Swiss-French Ingres User Group)

Saudi-Arabian Ingres User Association

Scandinavian Ingres User Association

Slovenian Ingres User Association

SWING - Swedish Ingres User Association

United Kingdom Ingres User Association

Yugoslavia - personal representative