In the shadows of Tuesday's Oracle-Sun enterprise system bundling partnership, and news from MacWorld, was some news about Ingres--an open source database company.

The news about Ingres was that Jim Finn joined the company as senior vp and head of communications--leaving a very high profile job as head of IBM Americas communications.

It was just over a year ago that Mr Finn departed from Oracle, where he headed worldwide communications. This was one of the most challenging jobs in Silicon Valley if you consider all the M&A deals Oracle was doing; not to mention working with Larry Ellison, one of Silicon Valley's top business leaders.

Ingres is assembling a stellar executive team and it's ambitions are to challenge the enterprise market leaders with open-source enterprise software. Given the high license and maintenance fees enterprises pay today, Ingres has a nice price umbrella to work under. But enterprise software is a hard sell. Here are some more of my thoughts on the company:

Ingres: Is this the dark horse of the enterprise software pack?