Les Salins du Midi Counts on the Reliability and Robustness of Ingres to Help Guarantee the Production Quality of Sea Salt

Ingres Corporation, a leading provider of open source database management software and support services, is helping to put a bit more flavour into French food.  Les Salins du Midi, the biggest producer of salt in Europe, relies on an Ingres open source database to develop a computerised sea salt production solution to better monitor the amount and quality of salt it produces and markets worldwide.

Not content to produce close to 2.5 million tons of various salts, which they market worldwide, Les Salins du Midi is also a leader in environmental consciousness. Searching for ways to maximise its logistical and operational efficiency without infringing on important wildlife habitats, Les Salins du Midi decided that Ingres would be the perfect salt in their software stack. The company selected Ingres to manage its salt production and has built a leading computerised production management system based on the Ingres open source solution.

“The Ingres open source model is a vehicle for innovation and value creation for our customers,” said Eric Soares, country manager for France at Ingres. “Les Salins du Midi provides a perfect example of how a company can benefit from our solutions and services. We are very happy to work with them as their systems evolve, and to contribute to the quality of their product – much to our culinary delight.”

 Les Salins du Midi, known for both its historical site and its outstanding efforts at nature preservation, made headlines in France for the novelty of its comprehensive solution that monitors all operations, such as preparation of salt ponds, daily tracking of water movements and production supervision. The system is also essential for optimising personnel management, anticipating the quantities of salt produced, and ensuring top quality.

“While an open source solution was not a specific requirement for us, we are delighted with this new configuration, which we feel is a guarantee for the longevity of the application,” said Jean-Luc Coulet, infrastructure and support manager at Les Salins du Midi. “The switch to open source distribution has slightly changed our way of doing things. We no longer have a contract with automatic renewal, but an annual order for support, at the same price or for slightly less.”

The reliability of Ingres, ease-of-use, and the quality of support are all elements that make Les Salins du Midi determined to be long-term subscribers of Ingres.

“It was extremely easy to switch to the open source version of Ingres and took less than one hour to complete the migration,” said Coulet. “We appreciated the flexibility of the solution, which makes it simple to move from one version to the next.”