Intelligent Enterprise

Ingres has added integration with Salesforce.com to its business intelligence appliance, which combines Ingres' database with Jaspersoft's BI software.

As a result of the integration, Salesforce.com subscribers can use the Ingres Icebreaker applicance to run ad-hoc queries and trend-analysis reporting against sales data within the software-as-a-service vendor's customer relationship management applications. The integration is done through a "simpleplug-in," according to Ingres.

"Companies can integrate Salesforce CRM with the new Ingres Icebreaker BI Appliance to make it easier for employees to see and act on data to make better business decisions," Kendall Collins, chief marketing officer for Salesforce.com, said in a statement.

While Ingres calls the product an appliance, the Icebreaker is actually a database, an extract, transform and load tool and BI softwarepre -configured and installed on a Linux virtual machine, so the user has what amounts to a turnkey software install that's managed and maintained as a single unit.

The appliance includes the complete Jaspersoft BI suite, and takes advantage of the Ingres database's BI features, including database partitioning, parallel query execution and other query optimization techniques.

More information on the appliance is available on Ingres' Web site.