CRN Interview: IBM's Ambuj Goyal

CRN: Before we get to the broader picture, what's the rationale behind the new free dB2?

Goyal: It's a high volume play. It's important that our business partners and developers across the world not have to go thru a procurement process to even try out the new stuff we have. We wanted to make their life much easier.

People can now just go to the Web. We expect with any Web download to get some interesting names [competitors etc.].

I have no problem, the more the merrier. Because this is an amazing technology and people are having a tough time getting their hands and arms around it.

CRN: Are you talking about the Viper version or the current DB2?

Goyal: Viper is just the name of the next database. This is Express, which is easier to download, easier to install and play with and is upgradeable to enterprise versions.

CRN: If I am an ISV can I embed this database without a runtime fee?

Goyal: My view is you can do with it whatever you want. The terms and conditions of the license are fairly generous.

CRN: What's the status of Viper?

Goyal: Viper is in beta and doing extremely well. We showed it at the Analyst Forum the first week in December where we introduced the beta and talked about the native store with significant performance improvement and schema mapping capabilities.

CRN: What's the time table?

Goyal: It's now in beta and still to be released this summer. [2006]

CRN: Some third parties are doing some interesting stuff around database virtualization, taking clustering across WANs etc. Do you see opportunity here for add-on companies to come in?

Goyal: We are finding a lot of partners in forms processing, one being Just Systems in Japan, or [other] partners who are embedding our capabilities in their environments, they see Express-C as a good opportunity.