Re: Informix Directions

If everyone don't soon realize most of you are wrong this debate will deteriorate into something not worthy of c.d.i. On a buying decision for dbms type products: Sometimes only non technical management decide. Sometimes only technical people make the desition. Sometimes there are influences either way. Any degree of influnence any way is possible. Which way this is going probably varies with time (maturity perhaps), what part of the database market it is, where it is (country or culture) and any number of other variables. Only some fairly thorough market research can show what realy goes on. It's highly likely that such market research is allready available. Any amount of story telling from anyone, even very experienced sales people or marketeers, is hardly interesting. "Experience" have a fairly limited value in this case. If someone can show some hard facts it would be interesting. Whatever the case may be Informix doesn't seem to care as much about their customers as they should. Their idea of going up market to the technically advanced customers is flawed. Very flawed. They don't understand what a great product they have for the the comodity dbms market and how they could sell it. This is both regular IDS 7.3 and the UDO. Noone can compete if they do it right. They have absolutly totaly no clue of how to market and sell the UDO. Not those who finaly decide at least. There seems to be some discussions going on inside Informix on this issue, but that hardly helps us. They don't understand their small to medium size VAR's/ISV's. They don't understand the opportunities. Even if someone in marketing/sales understand these customers other desition makers don't. Marketing get killed by development/management (if marketing exist at all). Now this is all Informix in Menlo. Informix in Norway is much much better at all this. Their only problem is they do not have too much clout in Menlo. I am still hoping for Informix's sake they will pull themselves together. They do have a database product that is substantially better for our purposes than anything else available. And our purposes are comodity database products for character and numeric data mainly. It seems like Informix themselves no longer believe they are so much better than the competition. For the record I am rapidly moving off 4GL and will make all my applications as database independent as possible so if Informix should foul up totaly I will not go down with them. I do however realy want to continue using Informix databases only. If Informix again becomes a great company I might even make my applications more dependent on them again. On Wed, 11 Feb 1998 10:57:48 -0600, Michael Segel <Mikey@NOSPAM.KingofMyDomain.MAPSON.Segel.com> wrote: > > >Mark D. Stock wrote: > >> David Kosenko wrote: >> > >> > On Sun, 8 Feb 1998 11:01:46 -0500, "Garrett Sienkiewicz" >> > <garrett@data-design.com> wrote: >> > >> > +Sales are usually approved by upper level management with input from >> > the >> > +trenches. >> > >> > I don't know Garrett, I've seen plenty of deals where the "trenches" >> > did all but threaten >> > to quit if Informix wasn't chosen, and the big boys went with someone >> > else. I NEVER saw >> > one where the trenches got a decision reversed. Most commonly, >> > developers were TOLD >> > what they would use. Once exception was where the developers were >> > allowed to dick >> > around for months with meaningless benchmarks. The vendor with the >> > most patience >> > won those. >> > > >Gee so are you saying that taking the time to do a technical analysis is >"dicking around"?Glad you're not my sales rep. > >Again, you can't focus on either the trenches or the upper management. >You need to cater to everyone. > >Like I've said before, >I've been in several situations where after the sales critters leave the >room, >the project managers turn to me and say "Now tell me what you *really* >think." > >Of course these clients have been bitten by some fast talking sales critters >who sold them >a bunch of fluff. > >If they don't trust you, forget the sale. Period. > > > Nils Myklebust NM Data AS Norway E-mail: Nils.Myklebust@nmdata.com