Berquist, who will start March 1, is now a managing director at Citigroup where he tracks software companies, including database providers Oracle and Microsoft. Previously, he worked as the managing director of software equity research at Goldman Sachs.
The hire, announced Monday, is the latest in a number of steps that Ingres has taken to build up its executive management since becoming a standalone company in November. The company brought on a number of former Oracle executives in January, including new Ingres Chief Communications Officer James Finn.
CA, formerly known as Computer Associates International, divested itself of the Ingres database by selling the assets to private equity firm Garnett & Helfrich Capital. CA has decided to focus its product sales on systems management and security.
The Ingres database is considered a mature and stable corporate database, which has about 5,000 existing customers. CA had transformed the database into open source prior to divesting the Ingres group.
The business plan at Ingres is to charge customers only for support services. There will be no license fee. It will also give customers access to the source code and continue operating an open-source project.
"Ingres will be a disruptive force in the database market," Berquist said in a statement. "The economics of enterprise software are ripe for change and Ingres delivers a credible alternative to customers wanting a higher return on their database investment."
In the past year, a number of companies have launched initiatives around open-source databases, including start-up EnterpriseDB, Pervasive Software and Sun Microsystems. The most widely used open-source database is MySQL, according to Evans Data.
