Re: Informix Directions

The thinking goes like this; a) The 'high end' is not 'high end' in the Tandem sense of the term. Rather, the 'high end' involves IS development which focusses on problems that can't be addressed with a commodity SQL-92 engine. It has nothing to do with the size of the customer. (For example, consider a medical research center with about 15 staff members building a warehous of medical images and asking questions like 'Histogram of kidneys like this one by state, age, decade please?') Informix retains a sizeable technical lead, but it's very, very, very hard to explain the intricacies of optimizing queries with a system that employs intra-query parallel, or why writing functions in a proprietery, interpreted stored procedure language is going to be two orders of magnitude slower than C. The only place this message penetrates is in situations where the customer is seriously looking for a tool that is *better* than the competition, not one that implies a 10% saving in TCO. b) Readers of c.d.i have to remember that you have all drunk the kool-aid and understand the technology. But you guys are the exceptions. The broad market reads inanities from Gartner (The database market is stagnant. There is no need for further innovations in DBMS technology. Similar rubbish ad nauseam.) Informix regularly wins technical evaluations, and loses the sale when Orable gives their database away and picks up on the services. The 'right thing to do' is to ship DBMSs that require *very* little servicing. That isn't the business model that works. c) It is very, very, very, very, very, very, very hard to sell ODS 7.X against Orable on Unix and SQL Server on NT. Informix can sell IDS-UDO and XPS against anyone, anywhere. The 'high end' strategy directs Informix's strengths to customers that appreciate them. d) Remember; today's 'high end' (defined this way) is tomorrow's mundane. The idea is to define the next battle-ground, not to dig ever deeper trenches on today's. This will probably not convince some of you, but try to think the strategy through from the business perspective. Ask yourselves; how do you best focus limited resources for maximum returns? KR P"an Informix employee, but speaking from the heart"b