Q1 almost baked... And with the IIUG conference coming up...

Hey! I just got yet another plug in the e-mail for the IIUG conference. Now don't get me wrong, I do like the idea of the IIUG conference and this little rant isn't about the IIUG at all. In fact I want you all to attend so that you can ask a lot of questions. Seriously. What set me off today, besides being a cold, icy, midwest Monday morning... is what I saw in today's plug. "Alyse Passarelli, IBM WorldWide Database Vice President of Sales and Inhi Cho, IBM WorldWide Vice President of Database Marketing, will discuss the marketing and sales efforts that revolve around Informix and answer questions from the conference attendees and open the floor to Question and Answers from all attendees!" One has to ask how a pair of incompetent nitwits have quietly been promoted to VP slots. I guess gender had a lot to do with it. After all, if they were men, they would have been RIF'd long ago. Assuming of course that IBM is being honest about their sales and marketing efforts behind the Informix brand. And you have to say 'Gumby! How can you call Alyse Passarelli and Inhi Cho are incompetent as Informix shows 'double digit' growth qtr over qtr and year over year! Say it ain't so!' And that's a good point. Informix has been growing. And its had good growth, albeit, overall market share has declined. But is that growth due to Informix being a great product, or due to any form of marketing? I mean, heck, during the 90's Oracle sold well because they had great marketing. Sorry Mark, but c'mon where's your 'data cartridges' today? ;-) OTC made a very good point that I could spend a lot of time finding misbranded products like Alphabullox. But when IBM IM was re branding Informix and DB2 as product lines, don't you think that their branding effort should have also included making sure that all of the products within the pillar were also properly branded? Ooops! My bad, Alyse and Inhi are 'database' sales/marketing vps. And I bet that it doesn't include Ass-n-tail, or the other non-database products that make up the pillar's portfolio. For those who do go to the conference, I don't think you should give Alyse and Inhi a free ride. IBM is inviting you to ask questions, so lets put some out there ... 1) Hey Alyse, Inhi, what is Informix's Q rating? And to be clear, I'm not talking about the Q rating for the average American, but the Q rating for the average IT professional? (Q rating means brand recognition.) 2) Just to put the Q rating in perspective, what's the Q rating for Oracle? mySQL? SQLServer? heck, lets include Sybase to help make Informix look good! 3) Alyse, what have you done to bring parity in to the sales force so that the S&D teams have equal access to IT Specialists that know either DB2 or Informix? Preferably both. (Hint: This is an old Gumby rant. Besides, I personally told Alyse at an IIUG BoD dinner about the problem and how easy it was to fix. Too bad she didn't write it down or talk to Jerry K. Heck, I even blasted it out here to the point that even the faithful readers who are not IBMers could tell you what a PBC is. ;-) 4) Alyse or Inhi, while its true that nobody makes their database purchasing decisions based on a standardized benchmark. (We know that they're all rigged... ;-) The benchmark is an indication on how willing IBM is to stand behind a product. If IBM isn't going to spend money and get in to a 'database war' with Microsoft and concede victory in the TPC-E benchmark without a fight, what is IBM willing to do? I mean specifically, how does IBM demonstrate that they are making a long term commitment to Informix? 5) Alyse, I was on the last conference call ('chat with the lab' series) that talked about Solid and IDS. Ok so I had to drop off early. I sent some questions to Denise and Jerry K. (Denise er Dennis, covers Moto btw...) One question had to deal with the fact that they 'benchmarked' using Solid vs DB2 in terms of demonstrating an in- memory database versus a disked base solution (IDS and DB2). What is IBM's competitive advantage over Oracle's solution of Times Ten and Oracle 10g? Don't you think that its a more relative comparison? Hey there's more questions, but I don't want to steal all the fun. Why don't we get a list of questions together? Oh and BTW, I'll wager that they'll preview the questions ahead of time so lets at least get our questions out there ahead of time. This way they can't say that we sandbagged them and didn't allow them to come prepared. ;-) But hey! What do I know? ;-) -G

Good morning, Mr. Gumby. Had to comment on this paragraph. There are a lot of men in the software group for IBM and within information management. To single out a woman in spite of this fact- and insult based on that- is going too far and doesn't progress anyone's agenda. Everyone here wants IDS to succeed, but that's not the way to do it. > One has to ask how a pair of incompetent nitwits have quietly been > promoted to VP slots. I guess gender had a lot to do with it. After > all, if they were men, they would have been RIF'd long ago. Assuming > of course that IBM is being honest about their sales and marketing > efforts behind the Informix brand.

xmoonmoonmoonx@aol.com wrote: > Good morning, Mr. Gumby. Had to comment on this paragraph. There are a > lot of men in the software group for IBM and within information > management. To single out a woman in spite of this fact- and insult > based on that- is going too far and doesn't progress anyone's agenda. > Everyone here wants IDS to succeed, but that's not the way to do it. To be fair, he was "singling out" two women, not one. Personally, I am not overwhelmed with the efforts of whoever in IBM is marketing Informix, whether they be male, female, black, white, green or indeed blue, straight, gay or transgender. In fairness, I am not sure how much more they could achieve given the mass of the corporate rock, under which they are crushed. >> One has to ask how a pair of incompetent nitwits have quietly been >> promoted to VP slots. I guess gender had a lot to do with it. After >> all, if they were men, they would have been RIF'd long ago. Assuming >> of course that IBM is being honest about their sales and marketing >> efforts behind the Informix brand. -- Cheers, Obnoxio The Clown http://obotheclown.blogspot.com -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by OpenProtect(http://www.openprotect.com), and is believed to be clean.

Sigh. Please get your facts straight. I wasn't singling out a single woman, but specifically *two* women. There are a lot of women in IBM that I have respect for. I have a lot of respect for Cindy White who manages the support team. I have a lot of respect for her predecessor CP who ran support for Informix prior to the acquisition. (Incidently prior to Informix CP had worked for IBM). I don't have respect for JP and never will. Nor Karen, JP's bean counter ... (but that's a different story...) The fact that I'm singling out two women should give you a clue that I'm not being sexist at all. Just calling their sorry incompetent arses out on the table. Heck, I've already slammed Steve Mills, Ambush, etc so get used to it. Sorry, I'm an equal opportunity offender. Were these men, I would probably have used stronger language than calling them incompetent nitwits. (I'd use stronger language, but I don't want to trigger the *foul language* filter on the IIUG gateway. :-P Alyse has been moving up the ranks within IBM for several years. I believe I first met her at a 'birds of a feather' lunch during eBU. In 2006 she was WW Sales lead for Informix. Now she's WW Sales VP for database software. So, should I judge her lightly as if she's a newbie and just getting used to being put on the hot seat? Sorry, Alyse has been in a position to implement changes within the S&D organization. Yet nothing has happened. So who do you blame? All hands conference calls? Sorry they don't work. Been on them and led them. Its a great way to introduce yourself to the sales team(s) and if you happen to get lucky and there's a customer opportunity fresh in their minds, you'll get some traction. But as to long term goals? Sorry, you need to adjust their PBCs to get S&D to do *anything* of consequence. Or change the sales comp plan, but that's a different issue and requires a lot more effort. While Jerry defended the 'calls', Jerry's never been in S&D or cross matrixed to S&D. Alyse has. So I expect more from Alyse. So rather than address the issue, you'd rather paint me as being sexist? LOL... too funny. But lets go back to the questions. Are they at all sexist? I think not. Are there more questions that we should ask? Definitely. Of course you do realize that the Q&A period will be short and the questions will be pre-screened. This is why I think it is very appropriate to put these questions out on the table now. But hey! What do I know? Definitely more than I'm allowed to talk about. ;-) -G PS. I could make fun of you, for using AOL but I bet that's for your AIM account. > From: xmoonmoonmoonx@aol.com > Subject: Re: Q1 almost baked... And with the IIUG conference coming up... > Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 07:49:09 -0700 > To: informix-list@iiug.org > > Good morning, Mr. Gumby. Had to comment on this paragraph. There are a > lot of men in the software group for IBM and within information > management. To single out a woman in spite of this fact- and insult > based on that- is going too far and doesn't progress anyone's agenda. > Everyone here wants IDS to succeed, but that's not the way to do it. > > > One has to ask how a pair of incompetent nitwits have quietly been > > promoted to VP slots. I guess gender had a lot to do with it. After > > all, if they were men, they would have been RIF'd long ago. Assuming > > of course that IBM is being honest about their sales and marketing > > efforts behind the Informix brand. > > _______________________________________________ > Informix-list mailing list > Informix-list@iiug.org > http://www.iiug.org/mailman/listinfo/informix-list _________________________________________________________________ Internet Explorer 8 – Get your Hotmail Accelerated. Download free! http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/141323790/direct/01/

> Why don't we get a list of questions together? > > Oh and BTW, I'll wager that they'll preview the questions ahead of > time so lets at least get our questions out there ahead of time. This > way they can't say that we sandbagged them and didn't allow them to > come prepared. ;-) Mike, I think this is an excellent idea. It allows the worldwide Informix user community to ask questions in a structured way directly to the individual responsible for the IBM Informix sales and marketing strategy. And it offers many of us who are not able to share the conference to ask their questions too. I created a question list on The Informix Zone: http://www.informix-zone.com/node/703 Hope that is ok. Thank you.

Sorry for the top post. Thanks Eric! I'm sorry I actually started this as a bit of a mini-rant yesterday morning because I made the mistake of waking up and reading my e-mail before I had my first cup of coffee. Today's the last day of Q1 so by the time the conference hits, they'll know just how well they did. Sure they won't tell you the number, but they'll be able to tell you if they're on track, above/below expectations. (And no its not a violation of Rule FD since the number that we're asking about does not reflect how all of IBM did, but just a specific product. (I'm saying this in case you didn't ply the exec answering the question with enough alcohol before asking the question.) ;-) I urge all of you resellers out there to think about questions concerning Informix's competitive advantage statements or lack thereof. If they're going to reward these two slackers for a substandard performance by making them VPs, then its definitely fair game to blast them with the hard questions. (Of course now that we're doing this out in the open... care to wager that there will be some emergency in EMEA or AP that calls them to now miss the conference? Funny how that happens. ;-) So please, go to Eric's site and ask your questions. Just don't expect them to answer them. http://www.informix-zone.com/node/703 -G > From: eric@herber-consulting.de > Subject: Re: Q1 almost baked... And with the IIUG conference coming up... > Date: Tue, 31 Mar 2009 02:29:12 -0700 > To: informix-list@iiug.org > > > Why don't we get a list of questions together? > > > > Oh and BTW, I'll wager that they'll preview the questions ahead of > > time so lets at least get our questions out there ahead of time. This > > way they can't say that we sandbagged them and didn't allow them to > > come prepared. ;-) > > Mike, I think this is an excellent idea. It allows the worldwide > Informix user community > to ask questions in a structured way directly to the individual > responsible for the > IBM Informix sales and marketing strategy. And it offers many of us > who are not able > to share the conference to ask their questions too. > > I created a question list on The Informix Zone: > > http://www.informix-zone.com/node/703 > > Hope that is ok. Thank you. > > _______________________________________________ > Informix-list mailing list > Informix-list@iiug.org > http://www.iiug.org/mailman/listinfo/informix-list _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ SkyDrive: Get 25 GB of free online storage. http://windowslive.com/online/skydrive?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_skydrive_032009