Columns

Joseph Alsop: The focus is on applications

• By Jack Vaughan
• June 7, 2001

Joseph Alsop and Progress Software, the Bedford, Mass.-based company he co-founded, have weathered a lot of fads and still persevered as an industry force over the years. These days, the embedded database that is at the heart of the Progress tool set is starting to gain attention as a leader in a distinct and growing market. ADT's Jack Vaughan spoke with Alsop recently.

Some analysts reckon you are leader in the embedded database market. What has caused this segment to come about?

Well, leadership in the embedded database market goes hand in hand with the cost of ownership issue. Among the companies fighting the big database wars - Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft - there was a tremendous focus on adding tons of features to databases. There came a point where the databases were very powerful, but, unlike a spreadsheet where if you don't use a bunch of features there isn't much of a cost incurred, when you have these very large-scale databases, there are a lot of costs and expenses. And embedded databases are more focused on obviously sitting underneath an application, and being very robust and scalable, but not having the complexity of administration and a DBA required to care for it. It's basically database technology that you can turn on and ignore. That's given rise to the definition of the embedded database market as being associated with the deployment of applications.