The Redwood City, Calif., vendor launched Ingres Involve, a formal offering of support for partners and threw out upfront costs—license fees, support and services—that often presented a barrier to partners who might otherwise have found the technology attractive, Ingres officials said.

Click here to read about Ingres' acquisition of a new chief financial officer.

Resource Library:

Ingres expects the development to make its open-source products a more appealing option to the channel than proprietary products such as Oracle and Microsoft's SQL Server, by lowering the initial cost of ownership and allowing some profit at deployment instead of months after paying off initial costs, said Mike Coney, Ingres' executive vice president of Sales and Support.

"We want to be the easiest database vendor to partner and do business with," Coney said.

The subscription model also removes the possibility of "squeezing partners" at renewal, a practice that leaves database VARs wary of vendors, he said.

Click here for exclusive channel research from Amazon Consulting.

Ingres, formerly part of CA, was purchased and annexed in November 2005 by venture buy-out firm Garnett & Helfrich Capital.

The company has since positioned itself as an open-source, and less expensive, alternative to Oracle, which owns 48.9 percent of the market, according to Gartner, and SQL Server, which holds 15 percent.